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?