Some of you might have heard about what is being called the “950″ penalty through the forums at webmasterworld.com. Essentially it is a penalty that moves sites that ordinarily would rank much higher to the bottom of the result set. It seems that some entire sites are hit while others are hit only for certain keywords or pages.

The consensus of a continuing 11 part thread is that the penalty is some form of over-optimization penalty. People report sites going into and out of the penalty on a regular basis. However it has proven to be a penalty for which there is hope to escape from if you own an affected site. Sites subject to the penalty still return as a part of the result set, but simply don’t rank where they otherwise would due to the penalty. The most common reports of success involve “de-optimizing” internal linking structure or improving the quality and diversity of inbound links and anchor text.

Identifying the affected sites takes a little guess work because not all sites listed near the bottom of a result set are there on account of the penalty. Some are there as a result of their ordinary ranking. Identifying sites where only a few pages are penalized for certain keywords is extremely difficult as a result. However, identifying sites where the entire site is subject to the penalty is fairly easy and should be the focus of your attention.

To find these sites simply set your search preferences on google to return 100 results per page. Enter one of the main keyword combinations for your targeted niche and go to the last page of returned results. Scroll down to the area of the area of the last 50 results and you will find sites potentially hit by the penalty. Identify a couple of sites that look like quality domains that might be there because of having optimized for the keyword too aggressively. Visit some of the sites and identify other pages of the site that should rank for keywords in their page title. Search again for those other pages and go to the end of the result set and see if the site is there for those queries as well. Do this a couple more times and you can be fairly confident that entire site is subject to the penalty.

A few other things that you can be confident of are: 1. The site owner isn’t making any money from organic google referrals (read: potentially cheap) 2. The site owner probably doesn’t understand the cause of the problem and probably isn’t even aware that the site is suffering this penalty 3. The site probably is an older site with a little bit of respect from google which is why it gets included in the result set 4. The site probably has a fair number of backlinks which probably have some age but might simply be too focused.

Put all of these factors together and you probably have identified a site that hasn’t been making the webmaster much money lately and that is ripe to get good rankings again with a little bit of work. Your chances to rank with one of these sites is much better than with a brand new domain, and with a motivated site owner, probably not that expensive either. Go deep sea fishing and pick up a bargain.