This week, we're taking a look at Google's new position 6 penalty filter. Has it been applied to your website?

In the news: Google releases Checkout Trends, Microsoft buys Fast and more.

Table of contents:

• Facts of the week
• Search engine news of the week
• Articles of the week
• Recommended resources
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A discussion in an online webmaster forum indicates that Google might have invented a new ranking penalty for websites that rank well for popular search terms.

What has happened?

During the last few weeks, some webmasters noticed that some of their long term position 1 or position 2 rankings in Google suddenly ranked at position 6.

The problem affected well established websites with a long history. The dropped web pages had long time rankings for popular search terms, usually on position 1.

Why has Google done this?

It is not exactly clear yet which factors cause that ranking drop in Google's results. There are two theories:

1. Google now considers usage data when calculating the rankings.
2. Google now has a better understanding of word and phrase relationships.

If different usage data is the reason for the change then web pages with a higher click-through rate would get higher positions. However, some webmasters reported that even web pages with high click through rates have been downranked.

The penalty also seems to affect web pages that are listed with an appealing title and a description that is very relevant to the search term so it might be that the click-rate is not taken into account.

We think that it's more likely that the word and phrase relationships are the reason for the ranking drops. It seems that web pages with too many inbound links using exactly the searched keyword as the anchor text were affected by the filter.

If the link to a special web page always uses exactly the same anchor text then the word variety is probably extremely low compared to the competing websites in the top results. That indicates a manipulation of the anchor texts and Google applies the filter.

What can you do to avoid that filter?

When you build links to your website, make sure that you use different but related keywords for the links to your site. If you overuse the same link text, Google might discover a manipulation.

If you use different but related keywords, then ranking algorithms will consider your web page relevant to a special topic. Use IBP's inbound link analyzer to get further information about the inbound link structure that leads to top 10 rankings.

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Google Checkout Trends reveals the sales data of merchants in Google's Checkout sales network. Google Checkout Trends helps webmasters to get an idea about the success of products.

Microsoft to buy Fast

"This morning (central European time) it was announced that Microsoft wants to buy the Norway based enterprise search company Fast Search and Transfer. [...]

Fast once had one of the best web search engines on the planet. AlltheWeb was first bought by Overture, and then Overture was bought by Yahoo!"

Google AdSense has the power to lower your stock price

"Israeli email marketer IncrediMail apparently relies so much on AdSense that, when it told investors early this morning that Google was barring it and disabling its ads, the company’s stock price opened 40 percent down."

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