cabbagehead - 10:45 pm on Oct 17, 2006 (gmt 0)

> Its difficult to quanitify "did nothing" as you can not actually "do nothing"

Well... I would have to agree with the person above who said that suddenly something happened and they've tweaked and analyzed endlessly and nothing happened. That's clearly a penalty, not a algorithmic shuffle. Now, the argument I guess is whether it was manually imposed or not. I believe it is Google's *INTENT* to automate everything but I can speak from personal experience on my own sites and tell you that when my algos are not ready or not yet up to snuff, I often fill the gap with manual edits ... otherwise my community will falter. So I do not think manual edits are out of the realm of possibility, regardless of what the Google press releases may say.

...this is very unfortunate. I really do wish Google would provide better webmaster relations on such things. Such a heavy handed approach needs to be used very delicately or it can ruin what people have worked very hard to create. Same complaint as always about Google in that regard.