Googles Position 6 Penalty
Many of us in the directory industry are used to the high flying rumors about Google penalties and here is an interesting glimpse into how and why these occur.
In a discussion about this issue, Google’s Matt Cutts recently wrote the following:
“When Barry asked me about ‘position 6′ in late December, I said that I didn’t know of anything that would cause that. But about a week or so after that, my attention was brought to something that could exhibit that behavior. We’re in the process of changing the behavior; I think the change is live at some datacenters already and will be live at most data centers in the next few weeks.”
So it appears this was just an error on Googles part, probably testing out some type of search result upgrades. My guess is that this tends to happen quite often but under most circumstances it is in Googles best interest to either not answer or give vague answers because the rumors tend to reign in bad behaviour by webmasters and SEO’s.
This example is just another reason why directories owners don’t need to jump everytime a new rumor of a Google penalty is spread.