tedster - 6:21 pm on Sep 3, 2008 (gmt 0)

Hello alexsv, and welcome to the forums.

The essential situation with any penalty - and this does sound like a penalty and not just an algo change - is to discover what you are doing that Google has penalized. Then fix that and submit a reconsideration request through your Wembaster Tools account.

There's nothing completely new in the penalty area that we've heard of, although the exact "number" of the penalty continues to shift around. The common areas for penalties are backlink shcemes (including paid links that pass PR), hidden content, deceptive redirects, over-optimization -- and all the areas that Google mentions in their Webmaster Guidelines [google.com].

Many of our key discussions about penalties and other ranking challenges are available in the Hot Topics area [webmasterworld.com], which is always pinned to the top of this forum's index page.