tedster - 2:10 am on Oct 15, 2006 (gmt 0)

I think it might be easy in some cases -- IF the site owner can remember what they did in the past that might be considered spammy by today's Google. The longer they've been "optimizing", the harder this recall might be.

Or it might be easy IF the owner can back off to an objective distance and see why Google might not want to see their website on the first page of results -- even though the basic algorithm calculates that it "should be" there. For instance, no one wants to think that their long-standing and profitable web presence might now be considered a "thin affiliate" with little redeeming value. But it might, especially if human evaluation is now at least part of the picture.

SINS AGAINST THE ALGORITHM
My best guess for the moment is that +30 is not generated by any one specific condition. From a couple different examples I've seen, it looks like this could be a kind of "junk drawer" to collect various and sundry sins against the algorithm. It looks to me like this +30 is added on top of the basic ranking calculations, and I do lean more to believing it's a manually applied condition rather than purely algorithmic.

Also I wonder, is there a "minus 3" or "minus 5" version of this penalty, or some other numbers that are not quite so easy to detect?

We've got to get into Google's point of view and see just what they are aiming to do. It's not some kind of game, with rules to be followed (or evaded) and then proper rewards doled out as our just rewards on the SERPs. It's easy to get into that kind of SEO "head" but it may not survive a reality check.

Google is most basically out to serve relevant results that keep the public coming back, over and over for years and years. That's what makes their business model work. That's why ads get placed and sometimes clicked on -- because Google can deliver the eyeballs. So they're going to take any steps they feel they must to make search results as good as they can. Of course they miss sometimes. And obviously, they also get it right a good bit of the time, too.

Let me finish these ramblings with a question. Does anyone with a +30 penalty have a Webmaster Tools account? If so, any clues showing up in there?

[edited by: tedster at 2:13 am (utc) on Oct. 15, 2006]