-50 Ranking Drop in Dec 2007. What is causing this?

[Greenvalley]

I am here as I came across an old thread from Sugust 2007 about a - 50 penalty.
My site and a lot of fellow webmasters on another forum have been hit by this.
Can anyone remober this penalty and what caused it.
I have a feeling it is too much juice and over optomisation
Interestingly most of these sites, have had a toolbar PR increase in last few days...

Reagrds
Valley

[Robert Charlton]

Hi Greenvalley - Welcome to WebmasterWorld.

I'm not sure about your dates, as you mention December in your title and August in your post. I didn't recall offhand specific discussions on this topic. Most of our penalty discussions have involved the -950 penalty and the -30 penalty, and there's currently a "position #6 'penalty'"... and all of these have been repeatedly observed.

I do see a small number of results when I do this site search [google.com] on Google...

site:webmasterworld.com "-50 penalty"

The first two results are promising, and the second discussion has a December date....

Massively hit by -50 penalty
Reason: bought 30 links from a network of web directories.
[webmasterworld.com...]

Site disappeared from Google around December 10, 2007
[webmasterworld.com...]

[Marcia]

>>Can anyone remember this penalty and what caused it.

Not a penalty in all cases, I've got a couple of sites to get to work on that are around 50/60-ish or so that just have never had more than a couple of links, and they'll probably move up when some more inbound links are developed.

If there was a site rankings drop early December, so soon after the November updates, isn't it possible that some of the IBLs that were counting before just aren't counting any more.

[mirrornl]

i did have a site wich was -50 for over a yeaar,
couldn't cure it....
finally i gave up