Trying to decipher my penalty

[Karma]

I've had a penalty on my site now for a few months, with traffic from Google down from around 6k per day to 1.5k (the hit was immediate not a slow decline).

Before the penalty I had made a bunch of changes, none of which should really have caused anything so severe - things like page title structure changes and affiliate link redirects. All of these changes have now been reverted and I've submitted several reconsideration requests since.

As Google never seem to reply to these reconsideration requests, I'm still working in the dark and I'd like to decipher this penalty and would appreciate any thoughts:

I've taken three pages which are almost identical in terms of:

- topic (but obviously different content)
- inbound links
- outbound links
- word count
- popularity

However..

- Example page #1 is still at #1
- Example page #2 has dropped to the bottom of the first results page
- Example page #3 appears to have disappeared from the index altogether

This example can be pretty much applied to my entire site.

I can't see why some pages would be hit and not others if they're almost identical. Am I barking up the wrong tree here? Should I be looking at something else?

[tedster]

How about the nature of the keywords each page is trying to rank for? Factors such as competition, and whether the query terms have any semantic or user-intention ambiguity might be in play.

[Karma]

Thanks for the reply tedster, I'm no expert on the subject but I'm confident that I'm ok in these areas. I should add that I've been working with a well respected SEO (from these very forums) and he's stumped by this penalty too.

I just that for once, they're reply to my reconsideration request.

Are there any clear definitions of the types of penalties Google can apply? (I'm guessing that's a stupid question).