Decius - 12:55 am on Sep 17, 2007 (gmt 0)

pageoneresults: I attempted to read your post, and read some of it. Irregardless, I returned to give others information about what I've learned so that maybe it will help:

My site is an old authority site (when searched via the name of the site it shows up on Google with sub-topics) and has been online for about seven years. It is probably one of five of the oldest sites on the topic in question around the same scale.

The SERPs are dominated by a few of the other old sites but mostly by new ones that have cross linked to one another and have almost identical content.

For all the time of its existence, the site has not faced severe unpredicted drops in traffic.

On Friday night it got demolished and traffic levels dropped to about 1/3 of normal levels. Before that point, traffic had been steadily increasing.

After much analysis and deduction, it was concluded that although various changes took place throughout the site, because of the vast number of different variables and sub-pages that were affected, it was eventually found out that the only consistent change that affected ALL the sites that were almost spontaneously dropped from google had their titles changed in a very minor way.

Some of the pages that had their titles changed did NOT drop. Therefore, it was not solely the title change, but the title change and some other variable that was not initiated by me.

After some more analysis, I have concluded what is the most likely cause:

The titles were changed in one pertinent way: They all had the site's name added to them. So they originally looked like "Widgets" but now they had "Widgets by Decius". This was actually done for visitors, and not for SEO reasons.

Regardless, it was discovered that the most popular pages, with the most inbound links that were changed were the ones to be penalized - and a majority of those inbound links did not just have "Widgets" in the title, but also "Decius", the site's name.

Therefore, the title change IS the culprit to the problem, and the problem was the addition of the site's name to these titles tripped some filter that seems to have concluded that I am spamming because my inbound links now match the title of the target too closely.

I have reverted to the old titles without the site's name in them in the hope that they will escape the wrath of this filter. In addition, I have contacted Google in the hope that this can be expediated, since it obviously is not my intention to make myself higher in the rankings for the site name "Decius" (since it is already #1).

Are there any channels or ways that anyone can suggest I quicken the speed at which this penalty is reversed?

Thanks.