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June 18, 2009 Evidence of Page Level Google Penalties? Richard at SEO Gadget showed how Google seemed to have penalized specific pages of his site from ranking in the Google index. The penalty seemed to be fair, in that there were nasty comments that slipped through his comment spam filter. The drop in traffic can be seen by the keyword phrases that page ranked well for. He noticed a ~70% drop in traffic for that phrase, which in his case resulted in a 15% drop in his Google traffic and a 5% drop in overall traffic. What I find extra fun is that a Google Search Quality Analyst, @filiber, tweeted: Google Page level penalty for comment spam – rankings and traffic drop http://bit.ly/JNAly (via @AndyBeard) <- interesting read! Of course that is not admission to this as a fact, but it wouldn't be too hard to believe that bad comments caused such a decline. Now, I don't think this would be considered a keyword-specific penalty, which most SEOs believe in, but rather a specific page being penalized. Forum discussion at Sphinn.

What are Google Sitelinks? Google Sitelinks are displayed in Google search results and are meant to help users navigate your website. Google systems analyze the link structure of your website to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information. Sitelinks are completely automated by Google’s algorithm. In short, Google Sitelinks are shortcuts to your main pages from the search result pages. When do Google Sitelinks show? Google only shows Sitelinks for results when they think they’ll be useful to the user. If the structure of your website doesn’t allow Google spider to find good Sitelinks, or they don’t think the Sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user’s query, they won’t show them. Although there are no certain answers to this question from Google, the following factors seem to influence whether Google displays Sitelinks or not: Your site must have a stable no.1 ranking for the search query. So Sitelinks show up most often for searches on brand names. Your site must be old enough. It seems that websites under 2 years old don’t get Sitelinks The number of searches - it seems that the search keywords aren’t searched often enough don’t get Sitelinks The number of clicks - it seems that your site has to get many clicks for the searched keywords It seems that Sitelinks don’t show to search queries consisting of two or more keywords The number of links - links are important everywhere in the SEO world, aren’t they? The inbound links with the relevant anchor text seems to influence the chance of getting Sitelinks How can we get Sitelinks for our website? If you can meet the above mentioned criteria, you’ll have a big chance to get Sitelinks shown for your site. But you can also improve the structure of your website to increase the possibility and quality of your Sitelinks. Google seems to use the first level links on a website for the Sitelinks, so make sure all your important links are on the homepage. The links should be text links or image links with an IMG ALT attribute. JavaScript or Flash links are not considered for Sitelinks. Also, it seems that Google likes links that appear at the top of a webpage. So try to put your important links at the top of the HTML code and then re-position using CSS. Overall, build your website following SEO best practices and rank no.1 for your most important keywords will ensure the Sitelinks appearances and help users to navigate your website.