Two Google-related issues that could pose problems for you cropped up this week. The solution to one of them is known. An answer to the other one (which appears to have affected many more people) is not.

We’ll start with the quicker-to-cover topic: an SEOmoz page seems to have been severely penalized because its URL ended in “.0″ (dot-zero). This may be an anomaly, but since there’s not much to gain from displaying “.0,” try not to allow any similar URL endings to appear within your site.

As for the other matter, all sorts of webmasters are reporting that their rankings and traffic levels have dropped in the last few days. Not a lot of patterns are apparent, and Google’s taken no (publicly discussed) steps that would explain the development.

Most people aren’t panicking just yet, as these sorts of dips have been known to occur from time to time. Still, given the state of the economy, the timing of the event is rather unfortunate.

It might be worth contacting Google or at least joining in the WebmasterWorld discussion thread if you’ve been affected.

UPDATE: Okay, never mind the “.0″ stuff.  Google’s Matt Cutts now writes, “So just in the last day or so, we switched it so that Google is willing to crawl pages that end . . . in ‘.0.’”

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