Marcia - 8:11 pm on Dec 27, 2007 (gmt 0)

Is it actually a penalty, or possibly loss of a 5 "point" ranking factor boost that's no longer worth that 5 "points" so it's discarded and reflects the total scoring and the consequent drop.

To simplify, if you've been paying me $1.00 a month and the value of the currency drops, then I'm only getting $0.95 worth of purchasing power from your payment. Correspondingly, in the case of SERPs, it wouldn't be getting penalized, it would just be less value placed on the currency (ranking factor) you're paying with, so the purchasing (ranking) power of what you've paid drops accordingly.

Penalty and lack of credit for something, or a lessening of its value, are two different things. That's exactly what I think it is: something being devalued one or two hops back. I've got a site (this one in particular) that's been ranking #2 and #3 for the two top KW phrases for a long time that's just dropped only by about 2-3 places, but I believe it's for the same reason some are dropping to #6.

[edited by: Marcia at 8:17 pm (utc) on Dec. 27, 2007]