Have you ever come across a website reporting a steep drop in its ranking among Search Engine Ranking Pages (SERP), quite unexpectedly? You must have at least heard of such complaints, as the alarming phenomenon keeps the entire webmaster community hooked to forums and discussion groups for advice and suggestions. But naturally so, since the ranking among SERP is crucial for the commercial success of your online business. Waking up one fine morning to your website appearing nowhere in search results at Google, and later gathering its radical fall down some 950 odd ranks, for no good reason on the face, of course cannot be taken lightly.

Unexpected, clear and downright low ranking of a website by Google algorithms, down some 950 odd places approximately, as if to penalize, is altogether termed as the Google 950 penalty. A dreaded situation for webmasters, the Google 950 penalty poses potential threat to the otherwise favorable public image of the victim website. Facing invisibility over SERPs after attaining and enjoying highest of ranks at Google is both mortifying and unacceptable.

For quite some time now, webmasters were almost clueless about the causes that invited Google 950 penalty. As assumptions had it, Google 950 penalty was blamed to messy HTML, validation errors, duplicate content et al. It was suggested that mending loopholes in the website, as well as, acquiring a few more good quality unpaid links from reputed sites could fight the punishment well and spring the withdrawn website back into the limelight ranks on Google's search engine page results.

It all remained hearsay, until Google's own people divulged some enlightening insight on "Google minus-950 Penalty". Matt Cutts of Google describe it as "Over Optimization Penalty" in fewest of words. Reportedly, a 'Spam Detection Patent' is in place among Google's algorithms, which is a phrase based re-ranking algorithm. As per the explanations extended by experts and seasoned webmasters, Google minus -950 Penalty is triggered on by Over-SEO efforts, including spam linking and spam documentation. Accordingly, linking to spam sites (co-op link exchange) can be an injurious SEO stunt for you that can pull you down to the bottom on search results. On similar lines, including just sufficient number and variety of related phrases is recommended during documentation, or otherwise may lead to your website being flagged for Google 950 penalty.

Overall, Google 950 penalty is Google's means to discourage webmasters from engaging in any kind of spam activity and subtly directing them to follow the ideal SEO.