I have read of a Google 30 point penalty with increasing frequency in the past 3 days. I have seen it mentioned at webmasterworld.com and Webproworld.com.

From Webmasterworld

Hello everyone, 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. Does anyone have some experience with this? What would the respectful audience here think a most likely reason for such penalty is? What do you suggest as the best strategy to fix this? There has not been any major redesign recently, just routine adding pages here and there. Some unique, some syndicated industry-related content. Thanks for any idea or comment

From Webproworld

I need some help about my webpage http://www.manolyahotel.com/
it was number one at google when you search with ”north cyprus hotel” but it is not anymore. my site lost for a few months and now I can only see it number 30 or 31 . I hope someone help me about this. thank you

Various SEO experts that watch Google very closely propose that this could be a form of graduated penalty based on the severity of the infraction where a 30 position penalty would be the first level, a 40 position penalty being the second level and so on…How can you tell if you may be subject to this 30 Position Google Penalty?
Well, according to some posters, you would conduct a search on google for your domain name without the www or the .com/net/org, etc. If your site is listed at #31, then you may be subject to this penalty.

Who issues the penalty?
It is believed that this penalty is automated. 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”.

The penalty could be anything from keyword stuffing to abuse of anchor text in a shady reciprocal linking campaign.

So, you have a website, but you find that you are not getting the traffic you need to generate sales. You read an article online about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and find yourself completely lost. What are metas, how do I write an effective title, etc? You are completely overwhelmed. A few days later, you get a phone call or receive an email from a so called SEO group that can guarantee top 10 placement for keywords.

Any company that contacts you out of the blue and guarantees top 10 placement is most likely using Black Hat SEO tecniques.

Beware of statements like;

We optimize your site, creating pages that get you top positions in the search engines.
We Guarantee top 10 placement.

These so called SEO experts may be using a technique called doorway pages. A doorway page is a page created just for a search engine spider. They typically consist of jibberish sprinkled with keywords related to your service or product. These jibberish pages then re-direct to your home page when a human visitor clicks on a link to go to your site. From Matt Cutts Blog, you can see an example of such a practice here.

Another common practice of black hat seo is to promote a URL that the seo company owns to try to drive traffic to you. There is an article that covers this here.

I know this article is short and sweet, but here are a few pointers in determining if an SEO company is on the up and up.

• If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
• Cold calling telemarketers are just that.
• Determine if the keywords they say they can get top rankings for are not obscure keyword strings that you probably rank well for in the first place.
• Make sure they are not employing doorway pages.
• Ask them about organic SEO by building traffic naturally through well written pages and a clean link management system.

I have been watching the Google BD Update and according to Matt Cutt’s Blog, there are 3 datacenters involved at 66.249.93.104, 64.233.179.104 and now, Bigdaddy is up at 216.239.51.104. I check our ranking every so often (as any business owner vested in success of his business would be) for a few of our key search terms. Those terms are;

website design
website designers
website development

I keep seeing multiple SERPS for the above search terms that range from 391,000,000 to 1,200,000,000. When the larger of the 2 numbers is present, I can’t be found for website design, on the second page for website designers, and on the first page for website development. It is only during the lower numbers that I show up for website design (typically on page 2 at around #13

I am hoping that the final numbers on BigDaddy will be the lower set of numbers. I have also seen a lot of criticism of the new bigdaddy update on Matt’s blog that indicates websites with hidden keyword stuffed front pages are ranking in the top 10 for particular keywords.

Sounds like there are a few bugs left to work out.Â