steveb - 10:41 pm on Jan 11, 2007 (gmt 0)

Yeah it doesn't have to be 950, although that is the easiest way to describe it... a few dozen spots up from the last result desplayed. Sometimes the pages can do better, like for searches for the eight words in the title a page might turn up in to 400s.

The penalty seems most often directory-wide. I had one directory recover yesterday, 54 pages now all back to number one or two, while another directory gets hit, with 152 pages dropping from the the top ten to 950. Heh, unfortunately I saw the good news first, then checked and saw the bad news a minute later...

"how do we get out of it?"

Buy Google, build a decent search engine.