About a month ago, webmasters began noticing abnormal changes to Google SERPs. More specifically, long-established rankings had fallen from a number one or two position down to a six. Reports say this penalty seemed to be more search term specific, than site specific, meaning that off-page SEO efforts were more than likely the cause.

Aaron Wall got into the game by posting some tips on how to reverse this penalty. However, about the same time, webmasters began noticing their rankings return back to normal. Matt Cutts went on record saying he was “not aware of anything that would exhibit that sort of behavior.”

Early this morning, Matt Cutts confirmed the “position six” penalty:

“When Barry asked me about “position 6″ in late December, I said that I didn’t know of anything that would cause that. But about a week or so after that, my attention was brought to something that could exhibit that behavior. We’re in the process of changing the behavior; I think the change is live at some datacenters already and will be live at most data centers in the next few weeks.”

Webmaster’s who had seen their rankings dip as a result of this penalty (and did not make major changes to their site to improve their rankings) should see their rankings return to normal as Google data centers roll out the changes.

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