Webmasters in an online webmaster forum observed an anomaly in Google’s results that might indicate a new Google penalty. Which websites have been penalized and could this affect SEO of your own  website?

What has happened?

Many webmasters reported that their websites lost all of their top positions on Google and dropped to position 50 and below.

The problem is that the usual metrics shows that the websites are okay. For example, one of the websites was older than two years, the inbound links did not change and the Google PageRank in Google’s toolbar also did not change. Another penalized website was older than 10 years.

Why have these websites been penalized?

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You probably know Google’s link command. It’s a special search query that allows you to find web sites that link to another web site.

For example, if you want to find web pages that link to Microsoft.com, enter “link:www.microsoft.com” in Google’s search box.

Many links are missing in Google’s link search

Unfortunately, Google’s link command is not as useful as it used to be. It doesn’t show all pages that are linking to yours. Actually, Google shows only a small selection.

Google’s search results pages show only a sample of the links that point to a page, so this list is in no way indicative of the link structure utilized by Google to formulate a page’s PageRank.

PageRank 4 and higher? That used to be.

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With MSN, the offsite factors are much simpler to deal with than either Google or Yahoo! MSN will give you full credit for a link the day they pick it up so link building, while time consuming, is reworded much quicker on MSN. When dealing with MSN and offsite SEO there are two main factors we must consider when finding links:

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Although most professional search engine optimizers agree that the green PageRank display has little to do with the actual performance of a website in Google and other search engines, many webmasters still focus on websites with a high PageRank when it comes to link building and website promotion.

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