Internet Marketing Blog by Noon-an-Night

As anyone who is involved in search engine optimization knows, Google has numerous penalties that can be assigned to a web site which does not comply with Google’s guidelines. In addition to the previously implemented -30 and -950 penalties, at the beginning of December, many webmasters noticed that their long-time #1 or #2 rankings fell to #6. This new penalty has been coined the #6 or Minus 6 (-6) penalty.

So, what were the main characteristics of web sites that were affected by the #6 penalty? According to a thread at WMW:

1. Well established site with a long history.
2. Long time good rankings for a big search term - usually #1
3. Other searches that returned the same url at #1 may also be sent to #6, but not all of them
4. Some reports of a #2 result going to #6.

So, why did Google implement this penalty on many established web sites? According to Aaron Wall of SEOBook (who had one of his own sites impacted by the #6 penalty on December 18th), he does not believe that this penalty was a result of any kind of usage data that could potentially be collected by Google. Instead, he feels that the “issue is likely tied to a stagnant link profile with a too tightly aligned anchor text profile, with the anchor text being overly-optimized when compared against competing sites.” This fits in line with a statement he made about his own web site that was penalized: “Much of the link building was done years ago when I was far spammier and far more aggressive with anchor text than I would be today.”

(As an interesting bonus, check out BlogStorm’s take on the multiple reasons Google might have chosen to use the #6 SERPs position).