-950 penalty (again)... how to fix it?

[FlyingApe]

I have been experiencing what seems to be the dreaded -950 penalty on one of my biggest sites for the last 2 years.

It has the typical traits like: Keyword in domain name and numerous slightly different pages with titles and H1 tags like this:

<title>Blue widget
<h1>Blu widget

<title>Green widget
<h1>Green widget

etc.

The site is in and out of the SERPS all the time. Suddenly it could rank extremely well for 2 months, and then its pushed almost to the bottom of the index for the next 2 months. Pagerank is still the same as before.

I've been constantly trying to add more unique text to each article, removing keyword from anchor text in internal links and writing a lot of articles that dosent contain the keyword at all. Nothing seems to help...

After reading this long tread here at Webmasterworld: [webmasterworld.com...] I got some new ideas.

What do you think would happen if I:

1. On half of the "Blue widgets" articles substituted the word "widgets" with a synonym? Example: If the article was called "Pet shop New York", and I changed that to "Animal store New York". Do you think that would help?

2. If I nofollow the internal links pointing to most of the "widget" articles? Would that remove the penalty, and let me keep the ranking on those articles I did'nt nofollow?

3. Wrote an insane amount of articles that didn't have anything to do with the "widgets" keyword.

[tedster]

Welcome to the forums!

1. Hard to say on that one - a penalty that lasts this long, even on-and-off, seems to be a very tough case. It might be worth an experiment. But this is the first I've heard about any -950 in a long time. I'm wondering if your situation is not the same as we discussed back then. How is your backlink profile, for example.

2. I would not suggest adding any internal nofollow at this point. Remove the pages completely, or block them in robots.txt, but don't mess with your internal PR circulation.

3. This one seems out of the box. If you've got that much new, off-topic content in you, why not build a new website?

Another thought - is your IP clean?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Wait, make sure there is something to fix first.

Just because Google penalizes a site does not mean the site doesn't belong at #1 for any given term. I see this far too often from blog owners who can't even rank on page one for their own name(looks mighty silly Google) because of a penalty they have no idea exists.

I've also seen sites with sitelink status where a single word is denied from ranking for that site... the sitelinks look silly with one word missing from the title/description. Often times the missing word is THE keyword the site wants most, aka the subject of the site (again, mighty silly looking Google).

Before you go making mass changes first MAKE SURE there is a 950 penalty and then ask others to review your site to see if you can get a consensus on what the problem is.

Perhaps before anyone makes changes they need to check the "omg i've angered Google" fear at the door because it leads to so many kneejerk changes that often don't help.

Maybe someday the secret sauce will be converted into a manual so all webmasters are on the same playing field. Until then... triple check everything before making ANY changes. It's better for Google to look silly than you when you're undoing changes that didn't work.