How to Avoid Google’s 950 Penalty or Bottom-of-Search-Results Penalty
You may have heard of the infamous and much-dreaded 950 PENALTY. Some call it a BOTTOM OF SEARCH RESULTS PENALTY.
What is the Goggle 950 Punishment?
This is a penalty, usually only applied to successful websites, that suddenly and without warning pushes all of a site’s pages down below the 950th position for any search result.
Think of that! One day after months or even years of promotional work on your site, all of the Google traffic suddenly goes to the bottom of the 1,000 results that Google will display for any search. Wow.
When you used to come up #1, #5, #20 or anywhere near the top for any particular search, now each and every search anyone in the world does will show up at the last page of the results. Gosh!
What causes this Bottom-of-Results-Pages Google Penalty?
Well, of course Google itself doesn’t say… precisely. But they do give you some very good hints. You are told never to duplicate content — don’t copy other peoples’ pages, their sentences, their exact phraseology, or even lists of links from other sites. Don’t copy period!
Okay, say you don’t copy. However, do you have hundreds of links to affiliate programs on your site? For example, does the site consist largely of page after page of Amazon books and their titles and descriptions? Or, do you sell thousands of eBay products? If you do, you will find that Google will eventually punish you for all this duplicated content. Maybe not today, or not tomorrow, but they will catch up to you.
If the titles and descriptions of products you’re selling are used by other people all over the ‘net, you can be sure that you ARE in fact duplicating other peoples’ content. That’s a no-no, and Google will not report pages with duplicated content near the top of search results.
If this happens to you, how do you get out of the Penalty Box?
Simply remove the offending links, stolen (or borrowed), the copied titles and descriptions, etc. Rewrite them if possible. Remove the duplicated stuff and in a few weeks you’ll see Google auto-magically relist your pages.
Assuming that this happened innocently, and that you never intended to actually copy other sites’ content, you may be surprised when the penalty is applied to you. You may think that it is unfair. However, think of it this way: What is a search engine worth that simply shows lists of thousands of the same pages when someone does a search? If you search for a books sold by Amazon, do you want to see a list of 10,000 pages where you can buy it?
Of course not. So, Google sends those duplicated pages into oblivion.
If you want to sell books from Amazon, you’ll have to find a way to provide unique titles, headings, descriptions, reviews, etc. for each and every book you sell. If you don’t, you’ll end up in the 950 penalty or bottom-of-search-results listings.
Web marketers beware!
