I am working on several sites focusing on travel to specific destinations. I use the same strategy for of all my sites (lot of free directory backlinks, some link exchange, mediocre interlinking between domains, all domains on same IP C class). The sites are between 9 and 3 months old. The site www.tallinntravel.com (6 months old, PR 3, 24 BL in GG, 387 BL in Y!) is the one that is banned. As of 1st July it felt heavily in Google and even the "tallinn hotels and travel" search does not show it in top 1000. The site suffered also in Yahoo, where just the main page is cached (17 pages cached on 19 July, 1 page cached on 20 July). For comparasion sites that are doing well: www.ljubljanatravel.com (8 months old, PR 3, 24 BL in GG, 375 BL in Y!, "ljubljana hotels and travel" SERP #3) and www.innsbrucktravel.com (2 months old, PR 3, BL in GG still showing the domain where it was redirected, 16 BL in Y!, allinanchor: "innsbruck hotels and travel" SERP #3). The only difference I am aware of is that to the banned site I redirected all my Digital Point Co-op Advertisings.
Hey, a nosy question: If some one got banned, all his sites will be banned too? Or only one of those sites get banned? The others are OK?
The site tallinntravel.com is not banned as far as I can see: http://www.whois.sc/tallinntravel.com there are also about 54 pages index in google and the homepage has a pr3. The latest cache date was on 8 aug 2005 05:21:22 GMT It's possible that it dropped in rankings. I do think that you have to be carefull with 'very similar' the sites have the same content (also known as duplicate content) I believe you should focus on getter more original content to all of the sites and your rankings will follow eventually.
How much coop weight was it? because I'm almost positive that's what did it. I had several sites that I did not care about that I pointed too much Coop weight at and the exact same thing happened...the number of pages indexed crashed and the SERp position went down. I will say that a couple of times my sites seemed to recover on their own, but it's still kind of a warning. Make sure you vary your anchor text on the weight and also make sure you get deep links some how.
It was up to 1000 points (new points). I do not think that it is that much. But it was just one anchor text and no deeplinks.