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You probably omitted the "www" prefix.  (Without the prefix, OSE says DA = 1).

I searched first with the "www" and came up with the same numbers as Dana.

Dexm10 - The substantive text on the sample page consists of 47 words.    In the U.S. 10 on similar legal topics, I doubt 470 words would work on a legal site nonetheless a page discussing such a common subject.

I noticed 10+ sub-topics on the sidebar.  My guess is that you'll need to combine the child articles into the parent and offer much deeper content to be competitive.  It will probably require a substantial investment of time by people who know the subject areas.

The links from low authority, unrelated sites are not likely to help much.  The anchor text (all keyword rich and targeting a couple of phrases) is scary.  Warn the client about the Penguin mauling you expect when the client reaches the tipping point.

@ Gary --- I had the same problem earlier this month on two keyword searches for longer keyword phrases in G.   Let's call these keywords "B" and "D".   The decreased volume for "B" and "D" were at least  30% each.   The shorter tail phrases ("A" and "C") were well within normal fluctuations (up slightly).

I do not document the results when I check G's auto suggested searches but my guess was that the order of G's auto-suggested results changed.

So, although SEO Moz search results still show No. 1 position for the keyword, the other critical question is whether G "randomly" moved the cheese by reordering the suggested search phrases.

My $ .02.

InHouseSEO - this is a GREAT question.   I wish there were more discussion of realistic case studies like this one rather than so much "focus" on negative SEO and a handful of high authority sites that were probably hit by mistake.

The consensus seems to be that you can file for lifting a penalty IF you can show you removed bad links AND document the efforts you made to remove the bad links that remain despite your efforts.

Matt Cutts appears to say you're more screwed if the penalty is algorhythmic.  Huh?  Buy BMR links, remove them and escape the penalty G imposed on your site for 50  -100 presumably manual and relevant blog comments?  Gimmee a break!

The 50 -  100 blog comments are probably going to be the worst of the lot to attempt to remove.  Have you had any sucess removing the trash directories?   You might be able to out grow the penalty by developing new links so that the number of suspicious (or bad) links falls below the tipping point.  On a recent WBF, Danny Sullivan opined that Penguin is just a devaluation of the bad links. (Not my opinion but it's an interesting opinion.)    No one has shared results but some people have suggested combining removing links with developing new strong ones.

Penguin is bizarre.  Some of my pages are (very) slowly returning to their former top positions even when some of the bad links point to them.   New pages with extensive content (think 2,000 words of unique/expert content) were among the first 2 - 3 to cover the event but now rank around 120. (Ouch).

I share your suspicion that for many of our sites, it's aggressive use of anchor text.   Developing non-aggressive links may dig us out.  Would love to hear from anyone who had tried this and what results they acheived.

Joshua - I moderate all of the comments to my blog before and remove any links before they go live.   I find this effort worthwhile because the comments seem to increase user engagement (time on page) on the articles that have extensive comments.  These pages seem to become reliable traffic generators and seem to withstand the algo changes.

@Prestige : thanks for sharing this.

Why is everyone criticizing the blogspot site that ranks No. 1?  It is a partial match domain which does not employ any SEO "tricks".  Therefore, not subject to the over optimization penalty.  Nor is the site plagued by paid links, link exchanges, or comment spam. (Well, the comments probably started yesterday).  Plus, look at all the "buzz" this site is getting.   At G, any press is good press (no matter how adverse).

On the serious side, I wonder whether the site benefited from the new site boost in a topic area where I'd assume all of the competition got heavily penalized.

When I read that part of BMR's post, I heard Claude Raines saying "I'm shocked that gambling is going on" and Peter Lorre saying "Your winnings sir".  B.S. indeed.

Been wondering about this myself.   Did anyone who had a site that was otherwise clean get slammed by Penguin because of IBL's derived from widgets?

Riplash & PVB : Thanks for sharing your observation about local.    2 - 3 months ago, I joined a thread and asked whether anyone thought optimizing for local would decrease national search SERP rankings and no one seemed to think it would.  My main site got mauled by B&W critters in April.  So, if I set up a new site to replace it, I'll set up a micro-site optimized for local and move the good local links there rather than to any replacement non-localized site.  Again, thanks for sharing this useful info.

Cesar :

I looked at your Scrabble Dictionary site. (Nice).

I probably wouldn't blog but would spend time trying to involve the user with the site and try to build loyalty or continue to build authentic socials.   (On other info search sites, forums seem to do pretty well and moderating the UGC to exclude spam is far easier than sustaing a blog.)

The scrabble game is buried in a secondary page and takes a LONG time to load.  (The ads for "Buy A Link" which appear to delay the game loading up in Java do not help.)

I'd consider moving the game to the home page or at least makiing it more prominent as a choice on the home page.  Then, I'd consider awarding some sort of prize (a Scrabble game?) to whoever scores the highest on site that month.  If you can restrict the prize to those in your FB community, you'd limit the CPU drain and gain community in FB. (Sort of a take off on EGOL's "Free Beer").

Just my .02 drachma/euro....   We'll see what far more experienced people suggest.

To "Guest Blog" or "Ghost Blog"?

I've been wondering which would be better given G's "authorship" tracking program.

"Onreact.Com" indirectly raised this issue in a recent blog post "Google Authorship Markup Disadvantages Everybody Ignores" as :

"Google might dismiss your guest articles. Your great guest blogging campaign on dozens of other blogs might fail because Google will count the links all as one as the same author has written all the posts and linked to himself. So maybe the links won't count at all."

Assuming all other things are equal, would you use "Guest Author" with G Authorship attribution (if allowed) or just ghost the article and include an in-text link without attribution to you as the author?

Seeing this too.   Ran my state and then "Kayak".   Similar SERPs to what you described (using IE).

I thought Google has been experimenting with geo-locating searches with increasing frequency.

Opened FireFox and searched for "Kayak".  Positions 1 & 2 were Kayak manufacturers.

Ran second search under my state.  Then immediately searched for "Kayak" and got new SERP results.  First two positions are now Kayak Tour Operations in my state.

Alan - I haven't seen any postings by anyone who has tried this but several people have suggested this tactic in various forums.  If you try this, please share whether it works.  Given the lack of success in response to deletion requests, a more direct route would be much more effective and preferred if G wants to favor it.

My EMD site dropped from 12 (on last Saturday's MOZ report) to 41 (last night) to 32 a few minute ago for the EMD keyword.  The site has also been affected by Panda (April & again recently) but, as Elia's response suggests, G is probably adjusting the EMD values.

Egol - I am a layman when it comes to SEO.   I began noticing strange results around 3 weeks ago.  I was not observant enough to begin to define the issue and did not think to run your experiment.  I believe my results began to change (or changed more frequently) around the time of the March 23, algo update.  Hope this helps.

Ryan - Thanks for taking the time to discuss Penguin recovery.  Your initial thread and follow-up Moz article were very informative.   On a lighter note, I moderate all of the comments to my blog.   I almost fell out of my chair laughing when an automated spamer targeted the keywords "click here".  LOLZ.  I suppose they were going to use a bot to attempt to spam a more "natural" link profile.  Only one comment like it I've seen and I was tempted to award a small amount of creativity points although their clients are probably being sold a terrible bill of goods about how to acquire a "natural" link profile.

Jest - It's not necessarily the volume of traffic but the quality of the traffic.  Most of these auto-completed (or "suggested") searches contain long tail terms which indicate the user is much more likely to convert to a customer.   My $ .02

I found Marie's comments very interesting.  Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be my problem.

I agree with Marie's advice not to do anything to respond to a perceived penalty.  Doesn't look like your site is "penalized" but the swings are extreme.

As a Penguin victim, I believe what you're recommending is not enough to be safe.   I was even penalized for using my name as the anchor text.  Some of the sites where I used my name might have been unrelated and a few might have been moderated too loosely but the high degree of danger greatly outweighs any benefit.  Whatever you do, do NOT point the links at your homepage!  Other people seem to believe there is a benefit but it's probably too marginal to be worth the time required and the risks.