Crush - 8:18 am on Nov 16, 2008 (gmt 0)

We have had 10 or so sites penalised. 3 or 4 were pretty similar in that they were thin affiliate sites and possibly deserved it. The others not at all and are collateral damage.

Because the other sites were banned I can only deduce it was via similarities in the IP ( same class but not same IP), dns or registrar. There is no other explanation because some sites are totally unrelated.

How our company works is that we buy domains centrally, get the admin to set it up on one of a few servers and then let our guys get on with building different sites. I always wondered if it was a bit too lazy and now it seems it was but as we recentley spent 14,000 USD on server hardware we did not want to go to virtual hosting elsewhere after buying that kit.

I feel really sorry for the guys who have been hit with a penalty because they are guilty by association with our "dirty" hosting.