New Google Penalty?

Once again, the tales of a dreaded Google penalty are making the rounds - this time a whopping 50 spot drop in rankings has been observed, which anomaly in Google’s results could indeed indicate a new Google penalty.

Several webmasters have reported that their websites lost top positions on Google and have plummeted to position 50 and below. Confusion reigns, as the normal metrics shows that the websites have not changed substantially - in one case, the website was older than two years, the inbound links did not change and the Google PageRank in Google’s toolbar did not change (although we know the toolbar is notoriously inaccurate at times and slow to update). Yet another website was older than 10 years, yet it too was penalized.


In the related forum thread at Webmasters World, several theories are being tossed around: one is that that the websites could have been penalized because of spammy methods used by a webmaster on another of his domains. It is important to remember that a website you link to might link to spammy websites even if you would never do that. Website widgets, counters and other plug-ins can place invisible links to other sites on your website as well.

Servers can also be hacked and there could be a link that you don’t want on your website. Google has ways of finding paid links, one of which is taking reports from your competitors - but some rivals are black hat enough to try and take you down by more aggressive methods.

One theory about the penalty that seems more likely is the use of paid links from .edu domains. It has been revealed that there are multiple hacked .edu servers that host websites on which these links can appear, and paid links from other sites can also cause problems. Again, this is a place where evil competitors could possibly harm you by purchasing links for your website.

It seems that Google is adjusting its paid link filters, and that paid links from .edu domains and other sites are the reason for most of the problems. Usually people catch on fast and fix their site, eliminating paid or spammy links. Remember to no-follow any links you pay for!