tedster - 6:18 pm on Apr 30, 2007 (gmt 0)

It seems to me Google has two stages of penalisation. Level one -30 and -950 for the next level.

I don't think they're related at all. The classic -30 penalty affected every url on the domain, and for every search. it appeared to be manually applied and nothing short of a manual removal would work. Even a search on example.com would return the example.con home page at #31.

None of that is what we see with thi -950 phenomenon.