Winooski - 4:41 pm on May 8, 2009 (gmt 0)

Hey Dave_Hybrid. I don't know if you've given WebmasterWorld enough information. Some ideas for possible things that could have incurred either automatic or manual penalization include:

- You used any of a whole bunch of techniques that Google is known to penalize a page for if they're discovered, including hidden links or text, excessive use of would-be optimized HTML elements (so-called "overoptimization", not a great word), or duplicate/redundant content, which isn't so much a penalty as much as a filtering for "failing to qualify as relevant".

- You say you've been "fairly aggressivly building links". How do you mean? Are you using paid links? Are they obviously paid? How about this: Are the sites with the links themselves incurring any penalties? Definitely review how those sites/pages themselves are doing in Google. That alone might account for everything.

- Not a reason for penalization, but does the site have a Google Webmaster Tools [google.com] account? You'd be amazed at the amount of info you can get there, including, sometimes, direct messages re possible penalties.

I'm not trying to be flip, but I'd highly recommend going through Google's Quality Guidelines [google.com] and systematically ruling out all the potential issues they highlight. When you can rule all that stuff (plus all the above points) out, then WebmasterWorld members might have other ideas for you.