Google and the minus 30 filter

If you ever read any of the webmaster/seo forums you may have come across mention of the so-called minus 30 penalty. It is easy to find out if your website is suffering from it because none of your pages rank above page 4 of the results (position number 31) and even if you search on “www.yourdomain.com” in Google you won’t find your site listed until the 4th page.

One of my sites was struck by it mid-September, when many pages that were top ten (and usually 1-3) suddenly plunged in the SERPS. I didn’t notice the pattern for a few days though, where almost every single search enquiry ranked at 31 for that domain.

Since then I’ve reworked the content, added plenty of new pages, got some good new links, got listed in Yahoo Directory and filed a reinclusion request with Google. However, all of this has been to no avail and public facing Googlers won’t let us know what we are doing wrong – they regard us as web spammers.

Well, thanks for that Google, but I’m trying to run a legitimate business. Tell me what I’m doing wrong and I’ll sort it. No problem, ok?

Since my rankings are so poor in Google I’ve decided to run a little experiment. First I’ve blocked Google from almost the entire site using robots.txt. When “www.domainname.com” ranks where it should in the SERPS I’ll start allowing the Googlebot to access other areas of the site.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Categorised in: internet marketing

This post was written by David