I have been struggling to find the underlying cause of the penalty that has been leveled upon my site (www.projectresponder.com). For example, this search phrase: skid units, shows my site at the top of the results in the datacenters (http://www.mcdar.net/dance/index.php) but when searching Google, it's nowhere to be found. I have a large number of additional examples. My goal is to find the cause so I can make whatever correction necessary in order to recover my rankings. So far, this is the only site I have that I know is being penalized. This has been a problem now for over four months and I'd really like to get it resolved. Thanks
I'd take a look at this post by Google today. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/06/more-ways-for-you-to-give-us-input.html And see if that entire right hand column of links to "sponsors" has been reported. Along with the TLA ad. I think they are getting pretty serious about this link selling thing. You've got the 302 redirect thing happening, but the page (sponsorclick) is not blocked through robots.txt as they recommend. The TLA link is a tiny URL, which uses another redirect, I'd just no follow that thing.
I don't get why the sponsors listing would be an issue. All of the links are internal to the site. They take you to the sponsor information page where you can either continue to the sponsor's site or go to the tech article. I read the link selling article as well and removed the tla code. I was going to try to make up for some of the lost revenue from adsense but took it down to be on the safe side. If G would actually explain why a site is penalized rather than having it be a complete mystery, a guy could actually make the necessary corrections and get back up to speed. As it is, it's like being in the dark with a blindfold on trying to find a penny in room the size of a football stadium