trakkerguy - 2:11 am on Feb 3, 2007 (gmt 0)

Also, some have commented that the "competitive" terms, or those that they made the most money with are the terms that were hit. The keyword search specific overoptimization penalty I described above does seem to be applied only to more commonly searched terms.

For example, the domain.bluewidgets index page is buried in serps when searching for "blue widgets", but comes up #1 on a search for "bluewidgets". "bluewidgets" (without the space) is not a highly searched term, while "blue widgets" is.

G may be tweaking the cutoff point that they are applying this filter for. Would make sense that they wouldn't apply it to every search, but start with the most highly contested (which attracts the most spammers), and lower the bar to apply it to more and more keyword searches.