In May 2009, a year after being in business, OneNewsPage.com founder Marc Pinter Krainer woke up to see internet traffic on his site turning to almost zilch - that too overnight. Krainer, who had raised money a few months back from investors, was not only red-faced but perplexed too about the reason for this drop. Only later did Krainer discover that the dip was because of Google Penalty, whereby your site will show up lower on Google Search.
"It may have been an accidental deletion, or deliberate. Maybe because it was a competition to Google's own news website," Krainer told ET during an India visit. The reason for the penalty, he says is still unknown. But it hurt him very badly because like thousands of websites, being crawled by a Google Search crawler is a must for OneNewsPage.com to generate traffic.
Websites face Google Penalty - also called the Sandbox Effect - where they may be subject to filtering to prevent them having their full impact. It occurs when a website doesn't conform to its standards in terms of quality, content or is found using subversive optimisation techniques.
"If a site isn't appearing in Google search results or it's performing more poorly than it once did, one can check out our help centre article to try to identify and fix potential causes of the problem," said a Google spokeswoman.
Subversive optimisation is another reason for such filtering. Historical use of links as a "vote" for ranking web documents can be subject to manipulation. Google has filed patents that seek to qualify or minimise the impact of such manipulation, which Google terms as "link spam". Link spam is driven by search engine optimisers who manipulate Google's page ranking by creating lots of inbound links to a new site from other web sites that they own.
THE PENALTIES
The penalties can be both manual - actually demoting a site -- or algorithmic, where changes in the search algorithm causes a website to move down. For one, a '-30 penalty', which Google applies when a website fails to use effective search optimisation techniques, lowers the site's position on Google.com down by 30 places. A '--60 penalty' will lower your site down by 60 places on search. A '--950 penalty' will make your site slide on Google.com by 95 pages - you are almost not there.
A similar penalty was faced by Adam Raff, CEO and founder of Foundem.com, a UK price comparison site. Like Krainer's, Raff's website also faced a Google Penalty but for three years. Unlike Krainer, Raff went to court following which,the European Union has started investigating Google's Penalty system last year when Foundem, and Microsoft reportedly said that Google was demoting their sites manually since they competed with the search major.
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