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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.

How much is the top spot on Google actually worth?  According to data from the Chitika network, it’s worth a ton – double the traffic of the #2 spot, to be precise. In order to find out the value of SEO, we looked at a sample of traffic coming into our advertising network from Google and broke it down by Google results placement.  The top spot drove 34.35% of all traffic in the sample, almost as much as the numbers 2 through 5 slots combined, and more than the numbers 5 through 20 (the end of page 2) put together. “Obviously, everyone knows that the #1 spot on Google is where you want to be,” says Chitika research director Daniel Ruby.  “It’s just kind of shocking to look at the numbers and see just how important it is, and how much of a jump there is from 2 to 1.” The biggest jump, percentage-wise, is from the top of page 2 to the bottom of page 1.  Going from the 11th spot to 10th sees a 143% jump in traffic.  However, the base number is very low – that 143% jump is from 1.11% of all Google traffic to 2.71%.  As you go up the top page, the raw jumps get bigger and bigger, culminating in that desired top position. Google Result Impressions Percentage 1 2,834,806 34.35% 2 1,399,502 16.96% 3 942,706 11.42% 4 638,106 7.73% 5 510,721 6.19% 6 416,887 5.05% 7 331,500 4.02% 8 286,118 3.47% 9 235,197 2.85% 10 223,320 2.71% 11 91,978 1.11% 12 69,778 0.85% 13 57,952 0.70% 14 46,822 0.57% 15 39,635 0.48% 16 32,168 0.39% 17 26,933 0.33% 18 23,131 0.28% 19 22,027 0.27% 20 23,953 0.29% Numbers are based on a sample of 8,253,240 impressions across the Chitika advertising network in May, 2010.