MikeNoLastName - 10:30 pm on May 27, 2005 (gmt 0)

"several outbound links"

Just several? What's the density like. What about internal links?

I'm studying two that I have like this as well to see the differences.
The first has over 20 external links, but it also has about 10 pages of plain text.
The other I'm way more stumped about. It's a directory page for a section of our site of just maps. It has 1 Adsense leadboard, almost NO non-anchor text, 7 Amazon links for related books, 8 other external links to our own other related domains as well as related advertisers, and only 6 links to pages on the same domain (some of them just jpgs). Yet it is still maintaining it's long-term ranking of #2 for it's 6,250,000 result keywords. It IS a much older domain (around 8 years old) than the affected ones. Perhaps they are taking that into account as well since scraper sites are a relatively new phenomena, and thus they are excusing any sites over, say, 3-4 years old.
I also have a relatively new one with an Adsense skyscraper ad, which has about 50 links on the page but they ALL go to internal pages. It ranks #2 under it's 800,000 result keyword. But it fits the rule ok because ALL the links are internal.

And BTW my suggestion of a few days ago that making minor changes to a dropped page may improve ranking due to freshness, seems to hold no water at this point. I see newly changed and cached pages still ranking where they were.