It appears Google has penalized yet I have not done anything against Google at all. I've only done reciprocal link exchanges, no purchases. How do I appeal this? Has anyone considered a class action lawsuit against Google? We can't be thrown in jail without knowing our crime, so how can the big monopoly Google punish us this way? My site is CreditCardForum dotcom. I wrote the URL that way because after this I'm quite paranoid about putting any live links up, because obviously some kind of linking I did is being perceived incorrectly.
Does not look like a penalty to me, just a poor distribution of PageRank , looks like a new site , so this may change over time as it evens out, if your using google webmasters tools it may indicate to you the distribution of PageRank through site.
Your site may or may not have been punished, there may be a different explanation for this, have you lost your rankings in the serps?