diberry - 6:24 pm on Aug 17, 2012 (gmt 0)

"Oh right, yeah, links and over-optimization. Luckily I am good on both fronts."

So was I, and Penguin took 80% of my Google traffic. I am not penalized (asked for reinclusion and got that confirmed) and I never have had a warning email about unnatural backlinks or anything. An SEO pro from this forum looked at my site and was mystified. I've never really done any SEO. I have four sites that are similar but in different niches and only one of them was hit. The biggest difference? The hit site had a lot of genuine, editorial outbound links. It's possible Penguin mistook genuine linking for a spam tactic. You can bet I'm linking out far less now.