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Hi Marcus, Your help has been invaluable. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this for me. Kind regards Mark

My best guess has to do with link velocity and age. Imagine you are a well established site, been around 10 years. You have 10,000 links. That link velocity would average 1,000 links per year. Imagine you have a site that is 10 days old. It has 1,000 links. That average is 100 links per day. That probably sets off a trigger like trending topics in Twitter. You get enough juice fast enough and suddenly Google thinks you are a big deal. That's the only explanation i can come up with as to how something new can pass up something established. With a brief history it can easily be influenced by mass link buying. Just my guess though.

I had the same kind of notice, and didn't submit a reconsideration request, but after a few weeks I lost most of my rankings, especially for higher competitive terms whereas I was ranking for among the top 3 results.

I wholeheartedly agree. Any efforts made to personalize the pages, engage visitors and not appear like a generic page of a large e-commerce site is a step in the right direction.

Thanks Greg, I totally get your point about "Earning" links. Struggling a bit with the notion that my competitors will give me a quality link in return for content. why would a competitor do this? I am also struggling with the notion that "The more quality links you get, the higher up in the serps you go. Its that simple." In my recent experience (post panda), that simply isn't true. I have clients with really good link profiles that totally blow away the competition (according to seomoz site explorer), there on-page SEO scores are all "A" yet they rank below many inferior pages and sites. I suppose my worry is that so many other factors are coming in to play that I don't understand. I will keep on "earning" links and see if it has the desired effect. Thanks again