driller41 - 2:54 pm on Jun 13, 2012 (gmt 0)

Question 1) Has anyone been able to get a page to escape Penguin by changing the URL slightly (so that any links pointing at the page would return 404s)?

I have tried that - renamed inner URLs - hoping that they would loose their bad backlinks, also reduced keywords in H1 ect, - no improvement.

I ended up with so little SEO on the page I could not tell what the page was about.

The whole problem could simply be that no improvements will occur until this thing is run again.

It is worth mentioning how vicious Penguin is, generally sites plummet down 5-10 pages, it is hard to accept that onpage SEO problems would cause that sort of demotion.

I would say Penguin causes penalty type demotions rather than reranking demotions is the best way I can characterise the drops.