31 January 2008
There is much relief for many webmasters after Google admitted it had accidentally given certain websites a penalty that moved them from first place to sixth place in its rankings.
Much of the industry has been aware of the issue for a couple of months and some have been able to make some changes to move sites back to number one on their own.
In the past, Google denied that this penalty existed but it has now admitted that a glitch in the algorithm could cause such behaviour. Google has tried to work with webmasters and, to their credit, admitted the mistake and worked to rectify things in a timely manner.
Glitches in the algorithm such as this one help webmasters examine the intent of the engineers behind the system.
What were they trying to do with this new bit of code that caused the problem?
It is likely they were looking at ways of reducing the weight of artificial link building and on page Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) factors. A lot of sites that received the filter were highly targeting one particular keyword and had been at number one for several years.
This has provided a large amount of realisation to the industry to make their campaign more natural in terms of link generation.
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