egomaniac - 6:26 pm on Apr 14, 2007 (gmt 0)

I still think that IF it's almost like a sitewide penalty, the problematic phrases are used sitewide as well. Perhaps in the navigation. Or in the TITLE / boilerplates of the pages. But essentially all this is applied to individual pages.

Very interesting insight. I think you are on to something here.

The main domain of mine that got hit has been more tightly themed than the other subdomains that haven't had any problems. The target keyword phrase for the home page was in many of title tags and all of breadcrumb text links multiple times.

I spent a few hours yesterday updating the sight to make it more persuasive to a visitor and less "over-optimized". Since I had not done this sort of major overhaul since I built this domain a few years ago, I was a bit surprised at just how much I might have "overdone" it.

At the moment, the domain is not getting 950-filtered, and hasn't since Wednesday. But it has flipped in and out of this thing for the past few weeks.

About a 4-6 weeks ago I removed a subdomain-wide link-back to this main domain from a relatively new blog that I added last fall. The net effect was to remove 50-60+ linkbacks with the target phrase in it. A few weeks later, the domain started coming back for a few days at time, and then getting filtered again.

So maybe that move got it from being filtered "hard" to being on the edge of the filtered criteria.

We'll see what this latest move does over the next few weeks.

[edited by: egomaniac at 6:38 pm (utc) on April 14, 2007]