Google Rankings Drop Actually A Parked Domain Goof?

Google’s Matt Cutts, head of the web spam team at the search engine giant, posted on Google+ an answer to the crazy day we had at Advice Interactive over our proud Page 1 rankings for our clients and ourselves (Dallas SEO) slipping into SERP oblivion:

I saw a recent post where several sites were asking about their search rankings. The short explanation is that it turns out that our classifier for parked domains was reading from a couple files which mistakenly were empty. As a result, we classified some sites as parked when they weren’t.

I apologize for this; it looks like the issue is fixed now, and we’ll look into how to prevent this from happening again.

Google has made it no secret they target parked domains and promise to drop them in rankings. The mistake by Google is fixed, at least for our clients, and our Page 1 rankings have returned. The “over-optimization penalty” still may be coming this year but we do not anticipate this causing such a stir for us or our clients as Advice Interactive Group prides itself on adhering to best practices and working alongside Google to provide the best results possible.