-50 and -500 penalties are one and the same

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Just thought I'd pass along some observations found during my unfortunate rebuilding after a penalty was applied to my site mid-upgrade, before the canonical tags were applied but after Google had begun indexing content. (insert frustrated swear words here)

A -50 penalty, which is essentially a drop to page 5 in standard rankings, becomes a -500 penalty if you set your account to display 100 listings per page, you then drop to page 5 as well.

So -anything penalties are really just fast passes to page 5 or beyond, at least that's what I'm seeing today. I thought that was interesting.

[aristotle]

Not sure if this is the explanation, but sometimes a page is paired with another page on the same site, and this can depend on how many results are shown per page.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I'm not sure what you mean aristotle. I was just pointing out that when I search for a former #1 result it is now on page 5 in traditional search, a -50 penalty. If I then change the number of results to show me per page to 100 in my account settings I still see my site on page 5, which means it's effectively down 500 pages, a -500 penalty.

If I switch my settings back to 10 results per page it again becomes a -50 penalty. It seems that the number or position is irrelevant, you'll just be 5 pages deep if penalized, at least.

To me that implies that Google is in fact ranking a TINY percentage of pages it knows about and the rest are tossed into the did not rank bin - which is however many pages back it takes before reaching deeply enough to ensure no visitors.

When Google says we have 1.2 million results they didn't really rank them all, nor do they expect you to ever look at the entire list, it's not possible anyway. -50 and -500 are the same penalty.

[aristotle]

If you change your setting for results per page (10 --> 100), then Google will shuffle the SERPs for some searches. The top ten (or any other range) could differ for the two cases. It's a kind of personalization to your setting.

[SEOPTI]

Not for me, a -50 will not appear at -500, maybe -70 or -80 but never -100 or -500. The -500 or -950 is in most cases a re-ranking penalty.

[lucy24]

Somewhere in the bowels of g###, there's a "real" ranking, isn't there? But nobody ever sees it, because a bunch of further algorithms get applied before the results are actually displayed.

When I reinstalled piwik, I was a little bit intrigued to see that some search-engine results come with a number. The popup explanation is something very, very carefully worded, along the lines of "the position this search result had for this user at the precise nano-instant that they did the specific search that led to the page visit you are currently looking at". In other words, your mileage may vary.