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Drop 30 Points in Google? Meet The "Minus Thirty" Penalty?

This penalty, that penalty, this filter, that filter - we now have a new one named the "-30 Penalty." But this one I think may have some substance. A WebmasterWorld thread has a lot of discussion on it, 6 pages, so far. Here are some quotes.

The report:

I just got my site rank #31 on its own domain name and bunch of keywords/phrases I usually watch were bumped from #1 to precisely #31. Those #2 through #10 are sort of all over the map but generally within the first 60 results.

WebmasterWorld admin Tedster said:

I've seen urls get a -30 and then seen that penalty removed in stages over several weeks after some condition was fixed. It sure looked automated to me. No, I can't prove that, except to say that Matt Cutts talked about wanting to do some automated penalties with automated removal quite a while ago. And in general, Google always looks to automate wherever they can because "it scales".

Donna suggests the cause of the penalty in this case:

I just looked at a site that someone on another forum posted the url for, which was hit by the minus thirty penalty. Turns out, that site would be what I would classify as a "thin affiliate". Does that ring any bells with any of your sites?

I think there are many things that can trigger this type of penalty. I have seen it also. I also believe it is automated.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This entry was written the night before and scheduled to go live at the time below.

posted rustybrick in Google Optimization at October 16, 2006 7:40 AM Comments (8)

Comments

This is the first that I have heard of this type of penalty. I would like to see some more studies with more proof.

 

Its true google gives less importance to new sites..
However this -30 concept is new to me..

 

very scary....

 

Hugh! i am sick out here of these stupid filters... Now -30 penalty, it really threats isn't it?

 

Is this penalty the same as Page 4 penalty discussed in some other SEO forums? Looks like it is applied only to top ranking sites which do some black hat SEO.

 

I was also hit with this penalty. Hundreds of key terms formerly in the first few pages, relegated to #31.

80% of the site original content. 20% thin affiliate. That was 7 months ago. Immediately we removed all thin affiliate pages, submitted reinclusion requests. No response from Google. So we went through the site and cleaned up all html code so was a classic case of following webmaster guidelines.

Trouble is once you are hit , that is it. Seems a manual inclusion is what is needed to get back in, but Google are not interested.

 

My site was also hit by the Minus 30 Penalty but I managed to fix my problems and feel I've got a good grasp on the problem. I've started a blog to teach others the steps I took to resolve the issue. http://minus30.com

 

To read more about the Google Minus 30, check out my blog.

 

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