Google’s “minus 950” penalty comes up every now and then and now it is coming up again at the WebmasterWorld forums.

The thread goes into how a few webmasters are claiming around the time of the Google EMD update they got hit by a -950 penalty. Now, they all say they do not have exact match domains, and thus do not qualify for the EMD update. Note, Panda also struck down around then, but they claim they are not a Panda like site.

So now the question is, can you recover from a -950 penalty? In 2007, Google’s Cutts confirmed the -950 penalty is related to over optimization.

Donna said at the thread that she helped a site recover from it, she wrote:

Whereas bwnbwn said there is no recovery:

Personally, I find it hard to believe you can’t recover because sites have recovered over the past several years from this.

Tedster from WebmasterWorld wrote:

The main point I want to make is that these “penalties” are algorithms that adapt over time but never always fully go away. So the -950 penalty from several years ago, well – yea, it is still here in one way or another. Knowing which penalty your site was hit by, well that is hard.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.