tedster - 9:57 am on Feb 8, 2007 (gmt 0)

But I don't see things that way anymore, steveb, mostly because of the members who report the same treatment of the their search phrases, except they get knocked from #1 to #120, or to #348, or #600...

I'm willing to back out of the "threadjacking" as you call it, if evidence accumulates that there really is a 120 penalty, and a 348 penalty, and a 950 penalty, and they're all different. We're not publishing a book here after all, we're having an ongoing discussion among many people. Right now it really looks to many like all these ranking demotions are just the many faces of one basic phenomenon, and the old label just didn't cover the discussion properly.

If someone wanted to throw the -31 penalty into the pile, I'd say no, that one's clearly different.