my First +30 Penalty
November 26th, 2006 by Michael Gray in SEOIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my top posts or learn more about Michael Gray. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
Noticed I got my first +30 Penalty today, not enough data to formulate a reasonable theory yet, if you’ve got anything you’d like to share in public drop it in the comments, or by email to keep it private, that even includes people who’s names rhyme with Cat Lutz and if your employer rhymes with Dougal. 
Sphere It
November 26th, 2006 at 12:45 am
No direct experience, but from following all the discussions elsewhere about it, it sounds like a “thin affiliate” problem. Does that jive with you?
November 26th, 2006 at 1:09 am
I wouldn’t say it’s a “thin affiliate” it’s got about 300+ pages that were written by real humans. I’d say about 50% is article based informational content with adsense, 40% is content designed to sell affiliate products and 10% is boilerplate stuff (contact, about us, privacy, contests, sitemaps, yada, yada yada).
November 26th, 2006 at 1:23 am
What the heck is a +30 penalty?
November 26th, 2006 at 2:23 am
Oh Ok some folks call it the -30 penalty
http://www.threadwatch.org/node/9302
November 26th, 2006 at 4:03 am
What makes you think that you’ve been hit by it? Rankings suddenly drop?
G-Man
November 26th, 2006 at 4:03 am
Is it the whole site - or just particular pages?
I get certain pages fluctuating like this - I reckon it could be over enthusiastic human elements seeing a thin affiliate or keyword stuffing - other pages with exactly the same set up are flying high at that no1 spot!
November 26th, 2006 at 4:57 am
This happened to 4 of my sites, dropped off the SERPs for even their own name and domain, all down to page 4. All of them were established in their rankings, constantly updated with new and unique content I wrote myself.
My conclusion is, that I picked up a large amount of irrelevant IBLs in a short space of time and that tripped the penalty. I picked up all the inbounds from advertising the sites on the DP Coop. It’s the only thing I can think of that caused it. Many will disagree with me though - I posted as much in the past and was told I was wrong.
As far as I’m concerned though, I can see no other reasons. It’s taken the best part of 6 months to get the SERP placements and related traffic back again.
November 26th, 2006 at 5:42 am
Some interesting discussion over at the Google Webmaster Group on the +30 penalty:
http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help-Indexing/browse_thread/thread/4ebf8c270688a5db/#
softplus would be one poster to watch as he is particularly knowledgeable on all things Google.
November 26th, 2006 at 12:06 pm
it was 2 pages who dropped suddenly
November 26th, 2006 at 12:19 pm
There has been a lot of buzz on many webmaster forums about this. There seems to have been a pretty significant change or tweak in the Google algo. Many sites are reporting that they are coming out of the “Sandbox” and many well established sites with long time high SERPS are dropping like rocks in a pool of vinegar (Don’t know where that came from).
I’d say we’ll have to sit this one out and see where it leads us. Do we really have any other choice?
November 26th, 2006 at 8:15 pm
Only 2 pages dropped? That doesn’t sound like the penalty maybe? I thought in the case of the -30 thing the whole site dropped.
In the ones I had go, searching for the keywords they were strong on, the brand name of the sites and the actual URL itself all resulted in 4th page placements. It wasn’t on a per page basis.
November 26th, 2006 at 8:17 pm
One of my mates sites has been hit by it, the site will not go above 31 no matter what, even though it still has a PR5.
November 26th, 2006 at 10:33 pm
I never been hit by this and I must admit that I didn’t knew that it existed until recently. What I’m now wondering is how easily can you trigger the penalty? I thought that you can’t get a penaly for content that it’s not yours (like IBL). Are things changing?
November 27th, 2006 at 12:03 am
I’ll save the swearing and punching the keyboard but is a +30 penalty meaning if I ranked for something 1 day and the next few weeks I dont show up for many pages deep in Google’s serp then after about 30 days I’ll be reinstated?
Because I ranked #1 in Goog for “alarm clock catastrophe”
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=alarm+clock+catastrophe
as of a few days ago for about a month now and all of a sudden tons of my popular pages are all dropped to the 3rd or 4th pages. Now this happened a month ago on another site and I got the rankings back in about a month or 30 days.
Now another weird thing is that on the query above my site show up #30 after being #1 for a few weeks. There’s 11 sites above me that all link to my original post. 30 days and 30 spots dropped. Weird? or a deliberate penalty?
November 27th, 2006 at 12:59 am
I think the best way of determining whether you’ve got the -30 penalty is if you consistently rank #31 for your sitename after ranking #1 for some time in the past.
(A -30 penalty sucks, but I want to know how to get a +30 penalty - it would be cool if all my rankings went up 30 spots in the SERPs).
November 27th, 2006 at 3:52 am
I’d really love to get a collection of the sites that hit the +30 — send me a mail (or use the contact form on the site), I’ll keep the sites to myself (unless you specifically want me to). There’s got to be a simple pattern otherwise Google would not limit itself to such general statements - I think they just want you to clean up your sites in general, knowing that you’ll automatically clean up the trigger as well (if they just told us the trigger then we’d just do that).
November 27th, 2006 at 3:51 pm
So from what I read people are just cleaning up there “untrustworthy posts” and put in a reinclusion request?
is this working?
October 25th, 2007 at 4:23 pm
If you rank #1 for your domain name search (ie searching google for domain.com) does that mean you have not been hit by a penalty? I’m wondering because one of my sites got hit hard in the Google SERPS today and I’m trying to figure out if it’s a penalty or something else. It still ranks #1 for domain.com but ranks only #37 for domain (and a subpage not the main page?) it previously ranked #1 for domain.