Homepage ranked on the Last page of Google = filter, penalty?

[Stas]

Hello,

I'm wandering if someone has come across this.

The site has had a manual link penalty, and was not ranking for the main keywords, Recently the penalty was revoked, site now ranks but on the last page, page 33-38, right before "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 359 already displayed." message, with couple of similar sites that don't deserve to be on the last page.

Anyone had similar ranking? I'm thinking it might be that my hompeage is really heavy and slow, which I'll be sorting now. Or duplicate content? Or maybe there's just no way out of manual penalty even if it's been revoked? or something else?

Thanks

[aristotle]

Have you considered the possibility that the site has an algorithmic penalty that was hidden by the manual penalty, but is now being manifested?

Or another possibility is that you removed or disavowed a lot of backlinks that had previously boosted the site's rankings, but are no longer doing so?

[Stas]

Without backlinks it shouldn't be on last page. It's just a bit strange that it's on the last page of results, almost last result. Yes it must be some kind of filter or penalty, just trying to figure out what exactly. The site still ranks no.1 for exact match term (which is reasonably competitive.)

[Robert Charlton]

Hi Stas, and welcome to WebmasterWorld.

Some years back, we had something that was variously called the -950 penalty (ie, minus 950), and also called the "end of results" penalty. Generally, it was an over-optimization penalty, and Google would re-rank the results in a way that they'd show up at the very bottom of displayed results. At the time, the penalty was applied to sites that had previously ranked high in the serps. There's no reason, though, that Google needs to confine that "re-ranking" mechanism just to what they used it for previously.

Check out this thread for tedster's discussion of how the mechanism might work....

The New 950 Penalty?
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4508154.htm [webmasterworld.com]

As tedster describes it, this re-ranking mechanism would be useful for queries that are commonly searched, commonly enough that they might be suggested in auto-complete. If your keywords fit this pattern, it may well be that Google has pre-computed the ranking slots using their "200 basic ranking factors", and if you got re-ranked due to an algorithmic penalty, they'd simply apply a multiplier to drop you down to somewhere near the end.

This is all theory, but... if it holds... in this case removing the manual penalty should, as aristotle beautifully describes it, reveal the algorithmic penalty in a pre-computed position....

Have you considered the possibility that the site has an algorithmic penalty that was hidden by the manual penalty, but is now being manifested?

End of results would be consistent with the position you might expect.

It would be interesting in fact to hear from others emerging from a manual Penguin action, but who still have an algorithmic backlinks problem, if the end of results is where they reappear.