superclown2 - 5:38 pm on Aug 13, 2011 (gmt 0)

If you wern't using paid links, then do you mind if I ask whether you might have an idea why your site is penalized?

I queried the ban on the Google forum and some of the guys there said it was viewed as just a doorway page for the site it linked to. That sounds the most likely answer to me. Interestingly, the majority of other sites on the page fall into the same category but they all sell products of their own, as well as acting as affiliates for the particular product that mine was pushing.

I've long believed that manual reviews play a bigger role in Google than is commonly thought. But I think that they are probably triggered by reaching a certain level of Google traffic rather than a certain position in the SERPs. For example, any site that starts getting 10,000 or more Google referrals per day will automayically be reviewed. (10,000 is just an example -- I don't know the real threshold)

This was nothing like 10,000, more like 150 hits a day. Very profitable hits though. Going off my previous experience and what I'd seen before I was quite uneasy when the site went from 4th to 2nd - nothing I'd done, I wouldn't know how to anyhow right now - and sure enough, a few days later it got smacked.