nuthin - 1:42 pm on Dec 2, 2006 (gmt 0)

AustrianOak, well in my particular case I would say it would have been a combination of causes that caused our site to start getting filtered out and pushed back under most of the keywords that we optimized each page for.

If you were to go back in this thread I feel a few people really did hit the nail on the head when it comes to 'thin' affiliate based type sites.

In my case we have a small local directory that lists businesses for free of charge via a dedicated business profile listing. Everything is custom written and done from ground up in regards to how we list them. Of course by offering free listings we needed some sort of kick-back for driving leads to these businesses, so we deployed Adsense on all pages so the model would actually drive us some sort of revenue.

With the way we set direct links to point to each site that lists with us.. and of course how we would write a brief company profile description on there dedicated page, that over-time... now this is only a theory.. that as we have potentially passed on some sort of power to the web sites that we list, Google has went "now why should we rank this particular business listing page as the authority when they link out to the authority themselves.

This would probably lead them to believe that there would be no reason to have 2 potential very similar copies of the same company ranking; thus devaluing one. Of course there's probably no logic in this theory so, I'm all ears.

Also I had 2 site-wide links incoming to this site and they were negotiated and in place on long term agreements of 12+ months, but when I did remove these.. 2 days later the site came back. As walkman said earlier in regards to this, he felt it would have been too soon for Google to determine the deletion of those site-wides and how they would then relate it to my site.. so, it does look like a bit of a possible co-incidence to me.

And.. I am also inclined to believe that possible internal linking structures could have played a roll in this hopefully short lived penalty. All I will say is.. probably too much linking from the front page, make of it what you will.

Or it could be just that my site came back because it was a bit of a money spinner to Google with Adsense, and there really isn't nothing wrong with the site from my aspect. No. No, they wouldn't do that would they? ;)

What suprised me the most is that the site has been online since the hey-day back in 1998 and is PR6 with good natural old links from trusted resources such as .edu's, so I was suprised it even got effected by some algorithmic change like this -- as sites like this can tend to become immune to any antics that Google has up there sleeve.

Sorry for the big post, just wanted to clarify everything. :)