Google's Position 6 Penalty
During the last few weeks, some webmasters noticed that some of their long term position 1 or position 2 rankings in Google suddenly ranked at position 6.
The problem affected well established websites with a long history. The dropped web pages had long time rankings for popular search terms, usually on position 1.
Why has Google done this? It is not exactly clear yet which factors cause that ranking drop in Google's results. There are two theories:
Google now considers usage data when calculating the rankings.
Google now has a better understanding of word and phrase relationships.
If different usage data is the reason for the change then web pages with a higher click-through rate would get higher positions. However, some webmasters reported that even web pages with high click through rates have been downranked.
The penalty also seems to affect web pages that are listed with an appealing title and a description that is very relevant to the search term so it might be that the click-rate is not taken into account. We think that it's more likely that the word and phrase relationships are the reason for the ranking drops. It seems that web pages with too many inbound links using exactly the searched keyword as the anchor text were affected by the filter.
If the link to a special web page always uses exactly the same anchor text then the word variety is probably extremely low compared to the competing websites in the top results. That indicates a manipulation of the anchor texts and Google applies the filter.
What can you do to avoid that filter? When you build links to your website, make sure that you use different but related keywords for the links to your site. If you overuse the same link text, Google might discover a manipulation.
As it turns out this was a mistake on Googles part and in a rare moment of complete honesty they admit to it. In a discussion about this penalty, Google's Matt Cutts recently wrote the following:
"When Barry asked me about 'position 6' in late December, I said that I didn't know of anything that would cause that. But about a week or so after that, my attention was brought to something that could exhibit that behavior. We're in the process of changing the behavior; I think the change is live at some datacenters already and will be live at most data centers in the next few weeks."
What was Google trying to do?
Even if Google says that the position 6 penalty was not intended, it is clear that Google tried to do something with the results.
What was it and will Google continue to do this without the unwanted position 6 effect?
The changes might have something to do with Google's increased integration of Universal Search in the results. In addition to the normal 10 web page results, Google now often returns results from Google Images, Google Maps, Google News or other Google services.
The way Google integrates Universal Search results into the normal search results changed during the last weeks. These changes also might have caused the temporary position 6 problem. If your website has been affected by the position 6 penalty you can now relax. Your web pages should have regained their regular positions by now.