Background

Google like any all powerful father figure lays down rules for members of its club to follow, anyone who deliberately or unintentionally breaks those rules will be punished. Google’s punishments, or as they are known Google penalties, can be incredibly hurtful to those who rely on their position on the Google search engine to earn a living.

The first thing to note is that no one, no matter how knowledgeable they are about Google actually knows for certain what penalties are imposed, and under what circumstances. Google plays his cards incredibly close to its chest when it comes to how they calculate a sites page rank, and any change in that position.

However, many extremely talented people have hypothesised and weighed up any available evidence, to come up with viable theories as to how and why various Google penalties are imposed.

Sandbox Theory

The first penalty people may come across, has become known as the ‘sandbox’.  This theory revolves around the perceived delay between publishing a site on the internet and Google listing it in its search results. The idea seems to be that a site must first prove itself with some decent content, and more importantly, that it is not going to disappear after a couple of months, before Google will list the site in its search engine results.

-30 Penalty

 Another penalty has become known as the -30 penalty, this is because when it first came to experts’ attention it seemed that a page that was ranked number 1 would slip down exactly 30 places to number 31, thus -30. Since that time, it seems that Google has subtly altered its algorithm to make the fall in rank less definite.

It is worth noting that many consider that this drop is not induced by an algorithm but is actually manually imposed.  However it happens, the result is the same, a depressed position on the search engine usually, dropping a site down to the fourth or fifth page.

Image Copyright and other penalties

There are several other infringements considered to bring the wroth of the Google God’s down upon mere mortal’s heads. Most of them are fairly self explanatory, the Duplicate content penalty, may, or may not result from duplication of someone else’s work, but can come from publishing an article that contains the same content as found on your site.

The Image Copyright penalty is pretty self explanatory as is the Content Copyright penalty. Some others such as the Sub domain penalty are somewhat more complicated technical issues 

-950 rank loss penalty

Another penalty that is well documented is the 950 rank loss penalty, like to -30 penalty, the -950 is in reality just a number. It relates to the perception that a site may drop 950 places in the rankings.

In actual fact this drop will equate to a free fall all the way to the very bottom of the search engine listings for a specific keyword. This of course can be a complete disaster for any site that is intended to produce an income by being found in the highest levels of a search for a specific keyword.