b2net - 8:42 pm on Oct 14, 2006 (gmt 0)

I have told this before but because this 4 page penalty comes up quite frequently I'll tell you again: I have this penalty on 2 sites and on both cases the site was hand checked by someone at Google and the next day it was dropped ~30 spots on all keywords. First site was 100% white hat, second site had too many affiliate links.

This doesn't mean all 4 page penalties are manual but in my case it was very obvious. I even emailed Google about it and I guess they were a little surprised about it and only sent me a cut+paste answer.

1. You build a good website
2. You optimize it well and according to Google guidelines
3. A zit faced student working for Google checks your site and doesn't like it
4. You loose 95% of traffic from Google the following day

Good luck trying to get a comment from Google about this.