Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Well first see if the promo works if it does and numbers make sense, you can apply the unconditional free shipping for a while if the behavioral economics of peoples choices are similar in a sense that they treat the promo and actual shipping change the same way, you can leave unconditional. shipping as is, if not revert back to the initial pricing. 3 Stage: Promo test Change shipping rate on the website, and try unconditional for a while Keep or revert back Hope this helps

I think that any study would have to be case specific to be worth anything.  A circle with two influencers or two popes would be far more valuable than a circle with 5000 drunks.  And at the same time who YOU are and what YOU produce is going to make all of the difference.  If you are putting out crap nobody is going to pay attention to you and if they do pay attention to you it is really going to be damaging to your brand.

Well there you go. If you have a page (Page A) that was ranking poorly due to over optmization, then you 301 Page A to a new page (Page B), the 301 passes pretty much all the negative link equity from Page A to Page B.  Therefore, Page B is going down the toilet now. You just kicked the can further down the street, vs fixing the initial issue.  aka  You just kicked yourself in the pants.  (you can insert what ever kicking analogy you like here for emphasis and/or humor, but don't beat yourself up over it). That is why I mentioned above, the 301 is really not a solution in this case and you need to noindex the page or 404 it. I am of the group that I try and minimize 404s as much as possible.  There is only one page to 404 here, so is really a non issue.

Thanks for the responses. If there is a penalty, how is that penalty implemented? For example, does Google take a "fixed number" and subtract that from you, as in a -25 "point" one time penalty? Or do they limit the ceiling of your overall ranking? The reason I ask is if it is a one time penalty then earning more links should gradually take the rankings back up. But that isn't the case with my site. If it is an issue of google devaluing all links due to a penalty, then I will need to start to take action to remove those penalties.