Avoid the Google -50 Penalty

2009-09-10 Christoph C. Cemper

10 Sep

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Avoid the Google -50 Penalty

CEMPER.COM recommends natural anchor texts and has been implementing them for their clients for many years now. In August 2009, the variation of anchor text became even more important than ever. Google changed their algorithm for penalties a bit and spread out the -50 penalty on a keyword/page basis. Build your links the CEMPER style and you can avoid or fix this automatic filter penalty.

The “new” -50 Google Penalty

If you hit a penalty your site drops by 50 positions. Specifically this is about the recent changes in Google in August 2009 and partially the beginning of September 2009 where variation of anchor texts became even more important than it was the months and years before. There are already articles about The 7 Golden Rules of White Hat Link Building, Link Growth in Link Building and Linkbuilding Case Study. Building natural anchor text is nothing you do once or change once because the rules change almost weekly. What got popular as the minus 50 penalty, which is actually an automatic filter in Google, hit in the last months a whole website, now it changed to minus 50 filter penalty on a page level or a keyword level. This means that particular pages dropped by 50 positions because of over-optimization for the keywords that the page has been linked to, be it externally or internally. It is the internal link structure that got under suspicion and that got into this filter as well. Obviously Google doesn’t want us to over-optimize websites for the high money terms or high traffic terms in order that they can make a lot of money on AdWords too.

Hit by the -50 penalty? De-Optimize your keywords!

Check your anchor texts!

Of course we don’t wish you or anybody else to be hit by a filter but as I said the rules changed and what used to be okay a year ago might not be okay today. The only thing you can do if you are hit by a penalty is to clean up and start doing it today. I heard reports from webmasters and clients that it only took 60 days to get rid of the penalty. What you must do is to vary your anchor texts and use natural language additions to anchor texts. You don’t want to link all your links just with one money keyword. It is not even plural and singular variation you have to use full language phrases, you have to use parts of the keyword phrases or you have to use typos. Just imagine your mum linking to your website and having no clue about anchor texts, about links and about SEO at all. That is the way you should build links. Imagine you have a super drunken webmaster that links to your website who doesn’t care if the text is correct or does match with your requirements. That is the way you should do it. Make it look natural and make sure you don’t overdo linking for your high money phrases. Don’t get greedy!! It is the same thing as with the PageRank. Don’t care about it. Keep your targets and focus but don’t overdo it.

Check your back links and anchor text distribution

natural distribution of anchor texts

Of course you wanna have a look at your website and your most important pages or most important domains today. We at CEMPER.COM want to invite you to join the Beta Test for our LinkResearchTools which offer one tool that is perfect for that. We have been building our Linkbuilding Tools in the last years and we do have an anchor text report which shows our link builders exactly when a keyword or a phrase was linked and with which text. Above you can see an example of our anchor text report.

Keyword Variation

We can’t reverse engineer the exact date when a link was found yet for all public sites, but we can show you a great breakdown of all the links going to a page or going to a domain with our Backlink Profiler (formerly Backlink and Anchortext Tool) in the LinkResearchTools. You can go to www.LinkResearchTools.com and sign up for the beta there and we promise you if we get great feedback from you, you will get a nice price or bonus from us back. We urge you to look at your most important sites today to find out how the match up against your competitors. There is not just a single number, there is not for example 15 times the same anchor text that is too much. It is not 100, it is not 2, it is what you do compared to all your competitors. If you stick out and raise a red flag you have a problem and this is exactly what you want to find out.

Of course we at CEMPER.COM wish you only the best and that you not get hit by a Google penalty filter. Nevertheless if you discover that you were hit by a minus 50 penalty on one or more pages, start cleaning up TODAY! The LinkResearchTools can help you with that and obviously we at CEMPER.COM can too!

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18 Responses to Avoid the Google -50 Penalty

Deeptimakati
September 10, 2009 at 8:40 am
Really it’s gr8 information,thanx for sharing.

i have refer tool (linkresearchtools.com)

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Erik Nobs
September 10, 2009 at 9:18 pm
Looking forward to trying out your tool. Great post.

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SEO-Doctor
September 25, 2009 at 6:31 pm
This has always been my theory on anchor text link building. I just had a client with 2k totally organic backlinks never done any SEO. And guess what – no keyword anchor texts in the 2000 backlinks at all. That’s what a pure organic link profile looks like.

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Caleb Edwards
November 9, 2009 at 6:55 pm
I recently followed your advice and beat out a competitor that had 178 backlinks using 5 different keyphrases as anchor text and a total of only 24 backlinks. The competitor had used a single keyword for all his anchor text in his backlinks.

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Tilen
November 11, 2009 at 4:12 pm
Hello.

This article opened my eyes quite a bit in regards of optimizing website. I have one website which seem to got this Google’s -50 penalty. I have a lot of backlinks with only 2 keywords and Google pushed my website down to 6th page in search results.

Can you tell me what to do with existing links?
Remove them completely and start building a new links “era”?

Or would be better to just replace the anchor text to a multiple keywords on the already existing links?

Wouldn’t Google noticed the sudden difference with all the existing links if I would just change the anchors?

Regards,

Tilen

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Tomas
March 5, 2010 at 4:42 pm
I think my site has been hit by this penalty for a long time. I am now changing my keyword optimization and see what happens.

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instinctis
May 30, 2010 at 5:38 pm
Nice touch on your post here, thanks. Is completely true that google and yahoo are great engines for checking your backlinks / InLinks (and a little more)…anyway I used to do the queries manualy untill i found this free tool: ministatus.com which also alows one to download the results in pdf file and also generates the free badge price for each and every queried websites.

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Michael Bastin
November 16, 2010 at 4:18 am
I’ve been hit with a minus 50 penalty which lasted nearly two years. I’ve sent 4 reinclusion request before gettin reindexed. Deoptimizing, removing internal link directory and deleting reciprocal links finally helped. I’ve also contacted the webmasters of these sites that used to link back from all pages and google finally loves us again.

Let me tell you that this lack of google love really poisoned the life of the whole team for a couple of years.

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seomoves
November 16, 2010 at 10:53 pm
Seems to me that Google has stepped up keyword specific penalties recently. Anyone else seeing an serious increase in keyword specific penalties?

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Rob McCance
November 27, 2010 at 5:00 am
This stuff makes me nervous. I can’t imagine painstakingly climbing the rankings for a couple of years only to get whacked back by FIFTY spots.

Brutal.

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Hoan
May 18, 2011 at 11:03 pm
Thanks for your sharing, it helps me a lot.

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Randal@Top Windows 7 Themes
September 4, 2011 at 9:31 pm
How can I be sure that I have received exactly Google – 50 penalty? My traffic went down so fast recently and I dont know why exactly. I am not quite sure that i have over optimized my anchor texts. Great post by the way

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michaelah Reply:
September 6th, 2011 at 11:13 am
Hi Randal!
Do you know which keywords drive the most traffic on Google? If so, see which position you have for them. A +50-Penalty would mean that you dropped by five pages, so it should be easy to detect if you’ve been on the first or second page of a Google SERP and now you’re on the fifth or sixth!
As for finding out what you did wrong exactly – it might be anchor text variation, it might also be too many links from too strong or weak sites – you might want to look at our Link Research Tools, specifically the Competitive Landscape Analyzer, which compares your link profile to those of your competitors’.
http://www.linkresearchtools.com/tools/cla/

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Joe
September 12, 2011 at 8:59 am
I think I’ve just had a few of my sites hit with this penalty at once – one of the sites must have triggered the filter and the others were on the same adsense account so they got lumped in with them as well.

Definitely makes it a bit tougher to work out where the problem might be…

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Saurav Rimal
October 7, 2011 at 2:46 pm
People using article spinning tools must be scratching their hair out at the moment.

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Gordon McNevin
October 16, 2011 at 9:23 pm
Great video! I had no idea internal linking could be a factor in a penalty. I’m currently trying to get out of a penalty myself. I’m actually going round and asking for paid links to be removed. Do you think this will work?

Thanks again!

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michaelah Reply:
October 17th, 2011 at 4:30 pm
Hi there!

Removing your paid links could be a bad idea, because it provides Google with a pattern they can check. If they suspect your links to be paid and they’re suddenly gone after you’ve been penalized, you give them additional proof.

Penalties can have different causes, though. Are you registered with the Google Webmaster Tools? You can sometimes get information in there or at least issue a re-inclusion request once you removed the causes of your penalty.

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demon chat
October 17, 2011 at 2:42 pm
Woke up this morning with the minus 50 penalty i am going to take you advice on board.

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