There is not a site owner in the whole World Wide Web that isn’t concerned about how their website is ranked on Google. Recently, you may have noticed that your site’s ranking has dipped. If you’re thinking it is due to Google’s announced over-optimization penalty, you might want to think again.
There’s been a lot of buzz on search forums and even Google’s discussion board about these drops. The whispers of the new upcoming penalty are getting louder. Others are hinting that is might just be a simple case of Google getting touch on scam sites. This time it’s actually something quite different.
It seems Google has had a little technical glitch that categorized normal domains as parked domains. A parked domain is one that is used exclusively to house ads without any other relevant content. It’s Google’s policy to lower the rank of these types of sites. If your site was accidently caught up in this net, then you may have seen a drop in your Google search engine rankings.
What happened is that Google accidently had an issue with their classifier for parked domains. It was taking information from a few empty files. This information told the classifier that the sites were parked domains when in fact they were not.
Google has since determined the issues that caused the mistake and are currently working on taking steps ensuring that it doesn’t happen again.
When it comes to the penalties for designing a site with an abundance of SEO and how that will or will not affect your search engine ranking on Google and what the possible fall out will be is still a matter, for now, of waiting and seeing.