Ranking drop from 4 to 413 yesterday

[StarryEyed]

Hi - has anyone's site ever dropped from being number 4 to #413? Happened to me yesterday afternoon. I checked all datacenters and appears to be across this boards. Still at #413 today for main search term. Other search terms have suffered as well.

I've been hit by the 950 once before but the site didn't make a stop at #413. Two years ago I was hit by the minus 30...but the 400 is new to me.

I did install a new shoppping cart but those particular pages aren't indexed anyway. Has anyone ever had this experience. I did a search for a thread but didn't see anything. I guess at #413 it might as well be a 950, right? :(

[tedster]

Hello Starryeyed,

I've never liked the name "-950 penalty" because it doesn't describe everything that's been observed that seems to be a the same behavior. My take on this is that there are not separate penalties for different sized large drops in ranking. Instead, the same "re-ranking mechanism" is employed with varying effects.

In fact, if you review that long, long discussion about the -950, you'll also see reports of various sized drops that do not always go to the "end of results." I would still assume that you're seeing an over-optimization penalty, as Matt Cutts has described the "-950".

[santapaws]

do you have a link to that article?

[Robert Charlton]

do you have a link to that article?

santapaws - Instead of giving you the link, I'm going to tell what I would need to do to find it. I'd go to the Hot Topics post, which is pinned to the top of the Google Search forum home page. There, I'd browse down to the Penalties section, and I'd look at the minus 950 summary thread, which will then lead you to a long string of discussions on the subject.

Also to help find any topic, you can use our Site Search [webmasterworld.com] page to search the site for more information.

[phase1]

i have been reading through this 950 penalty, and i just dont understand, I have a new site, indexed by google for about 2-3weeks, i have NOTHING shady, have redirected my non to www, have NO link buying crap, this is a white hat site completely, i expected to start dropping down the listings until i gained some popularity, but to go from #9 on friday, to #266 yesterday, to #300+ today, i have sold my soul by using google analytics and webmaster tools, im really p*@sed off and don't know what i have done, and with a million pages on here talking about 950, im ready to jump out of my window.

[bwnbwn]

"I have a new site, indexed by google for about 2-3weeks" phase1 give it some time the site is so new you can't expect it to rank above sites that are 2-10 years old can you? Build "TRUST" this is the way the site will move up and rank.
Takes time so be prepared to dig in nothing easy about this business NOTHING.

[phase1]

like i said, i expected to drop down, but 400+ in 1 day, its a joke. i expected to drop around this time, im not stupid, what is stupid is, how can google expect you to get 'trust', if you drop them so drastically. i think the moral of the story is, google suck. where i work, we have several domains that are 12 months old, that have been number 1 for a VERY hard market, outranking sites that are far older. we have tested this theory in depth and domain age is not a factor.

[edited by: tedster at 8:38 pm (utc) on Mar. 16, 2008]

[santapaws]

so having read the sticky it seems to say:
-950 over optimisation
-30 total loss of trust

conclusion: its better to be totally untrusted than over optimising your pages

am i missing something?

[tedster]

That's the strangeness of the -950 phenomenon, santapaws. It seems incredibly harsh, given the cirumstances. It also seems to be algorithmic, whereas the -30 seems to be manually appplied and, up until recently at least, manually removed. Or maybe I should say the -30 penalty "seemed" to be manual, because the classic cases became fuzzier and fuzzier after a while. The number thirty certainly changed. And some sites regained ranking for the domain name search but not other key terms.

However, no one should want a -30 in their history with Google. It seemed to indicate an extreme lack of trust and that can follow your domain for a long time.