TravelMan - 7:11 am on May 8, 2006 (gmt 0)

>I dont think its a penalty. I think its a google glitch that needs fixing. Whilst its not really affecting us too badly at the moment, I'm hoping its not going to be a longterm issue.

I agree, although I wouldn't describe it as a glitch, more a monumental ballsup.

I think they've just cranked things down too tightly and have literally TTBOWTBW.

You'd think that someone at google would have the good sense to compare and contrast a serp of say, March 2005 with that of today and make some kind of rollback based on the observation ...

Its kind of ironic in that on the one hand they say don't do things to artificially inflate your search rankings yet, if you don't go out and get the right kind of links from the right kinds of places then you end up in search hell.The "www.mysite.com" example is a good indicator of how some sites have that trust whilst others don't. Perhaps its a whitelist thing too. Some of you may recall the eval.google.com thing. Perhaps its all as simple as that. A site that is marked as 'untrustworthy' can't rank for jack, no matter what it does, call it a sandbox with weights on!