AndyA - 4:20 pm on Jan 17, 2007 (gmt 0)

Our series of sites is also suffering from this problem. I have to put in a vote of agreement for the fact that Google seem to be targeting this at very retail heavy areas.

This is absolutely not what I'm seeing. I have pages with NO ads, NO retail, NO ADSENSE, absolutely NOTHING except unique, original content, and they are at the bottom of the results. Many don't even have H1 tags, and have a very low percentage of keyword duplication (- 2%), so no overoptimization on them, either.

There's more to it than just heavy retail, although that could be a factor for some sites, I suppose, because this does not apply to my site at all.