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I suppose it was only a matter of time, but webmasters from all around the globe are finding themselves slapped square across the face with the -950 Penalty, or the Over Optimization Penalty.

After spending thousands on specialized tools, manpower, and over-priced expert advice, you’ve optimized every page on your site and have achieved killer rankings for all your main terms; but maybe not for long.

This goes beyond – er – to the side of Google spam filters. In various verticals (there is much speculation that this penalty is applied only to specific keywords), Google robots are looking for sites that are optimized so well, they are seen as unnatural. We’ve seen a site that was ranking on the first page for three highly competitive words for over a year suddenly disappear (well not completely disappear – they’ve settled, quite uncomfortably, about 950 positions lower).

Ironically, this recent change has not seemed to drastically affect spam sites at all. A cynical friend of mine made the observation that none of his sites automatically generated for the purpose of Adsense revenue have been beaten down. Could it be that as long as Google is making money on the site, it’s overlooked for a certain time period?

Probably not, but I think the world of Internet Marketing could use a Google conspiracy theory. And if you wanted to really go out on a limb, you could hypothesize that since Google has access to millions of companies’ revenue data they could put a cap on how much one makes. When they start to go over their allotment, all Google has to do is increase the minimum bids or invent a new penalty. But I digress….

From what is being discussed in forums, the key to lifting a -950 Penalty, if you find yourself in this mess, is a site-wide process of de-optimization. That’s right – start removing all of the changes recommended to you by those tools and experts. Look at your site map through Google Webmaster Tools to see if there is an abundance of internal links pointing to the same page. Look for an abundance of identical anchor text pointing to those pages. Change your meta-tags and H1 tags to deemphasize the term you want to rank for. Remove some of those semantically relevant terms that appear too frequently in your text.

But how much is too much? I have no idea. And is seems that presently, neither does anyone else. I know that Google is responsible for connecting this planet on a scale unheard of 20 years ago; that their business philosophy is one unparalleled; that an infinite amount of information is available wherever you are at any time. I know these wonderful things to be true, but today I would like nothing more than to kick Google square in its robot testes.