The more you think about it, and keep doing what you think are the right things, damn, I have been penalized again. It seems these days newer sites are just proned to getting some type of penalty one way or never, then I have run across these sites that spread "google" fear, or fear mongering info about google. It does not mean it is not true, and with all this info mean flopping around on the net with their opinions on what they think google wants to see... The other day I was on a High DA site that had 70. It was an amazon affiliate site, even though he had tons of content, and i would not be surprised if he had put 1000's of hours into his site, as some of his content was in the 7k range, and that is 7k words on just one page, however, he is an old timer site still using software such as dreamweaver to create his site; Even though his design is poor, his quality is high, along with his DA of 70. The moral of this story is that his site is pumped full of affiliate links from one page to the next.... Now the question: You can not setup a site today loaded with links and expect google is going to give you a helping hand, so when did you notice that you site was sliding ever closer to google's "authority" safe zone, then you realize you did not have to be that google do-gooder that google demands today. From what I can tell, once you reach a certain level of "authority" then you can let loose somewhat and not fear about what google is doing to do from one day to the next... after all, how about that "amazon" affiliate site that is stuffed with pure keyword spam, and links from one page to the next, however, I think there are only a few people in the world that could create content such as his, over 10 years, and 100's or even 1000's of articles (only written by him) It tells me one thing, google is saying if your content is that good, then we are going to let you slide on everything else we oppose, ie spam...
When I would type my main keyword into google and have multiple pages listed under my site in the first position.