The Don’t-Push-It Penalty
When I was playing around with my (referer) statistics a bit, I noticed that something strange was going on. After a little bit of digging, I noticed some new sort of penalty or filter. It’s not a minus 950 penalty or something like that, but more like a Till-Here-And-No-Further penalty.
Earlier this year, Wiep.net received a PageRank penalty because of a few sponsored links (not sponsoring me, though) in the footer. In that post, I said that
Some have suggested to nofollow or remove the links in the footer and to do a reinclusion request, but I’ve decided not to. In stead, I’ll do exactly what I said I will do my footer; I’ll leave the links up (which is mandatory when you use the template) until I have a new design.
Apparently, Google didn’t like this. All posts that were published before this date (including the PR penalty post) show up in Google without a problem. Every post that got published after I said that I won’t live by all rules that Google sets, however, don’t. Pages still get cached and indexed, but they just don’t show up anymore. No signal in the Google Webmaster console, btw.
So, Matt, after the #6 penalty, the -950 penalty, and other penalties, is this the Silence! penalty?
What’s Going On with Google Cache?
It seems like Google’s testing out some stuff with the setup of their cached pages. Below are two screen shots of the cached page of Wiep.net. The first one is the “original” one, which was reached by clicking on the “cached” link of the top result at Google.com. When trying to see the cached version of my homepage via Google’s Dutch version, I noticed (and Martijn and Heini noticed the same thing) that this version does not have a date of cache retrieval nor a link to the ‘cached text only’ version.
This is the original version:
And this is the “Dutch” version:
It’s not data center based -both cached versions above were requested from the same data center IP-, but it seems to be language based, as the Dutch version of Google Belgium shows the same version as well.
To make this even stranger, the “cache” link that Google provides on every cached page (top left), does not work anymore. This link points to http://www.google.com/intl/en/help/features.html#cached, but their is no cache anchor present on the page. In fact, the word anchor doesn’t even get mentioned on the page, in contrast to, let’s say, about a year ago.
Is this strange or is it just me?
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