I often see threads at the Google Webmasters Help discussion forum of people who have sites that were penalized for having issues with their site in the Google Webmaster guidelines. But it is not often where you see a thread that one issue then opens up an other issue, then an other issue and so on.

A recent Google Webmasters Help thread has just that. It starts off by looking like the site has a copied privacy policy, which isn’t nice, but normally doesn’t warrant a penalty. It then looks like there are way too many link pages, so that should be removed. We then notice that some of this person’s sites have duplicate content amongst themselves. So fix that.

Then I see this from the webmaster:

Okay, to have hundreds of sites in different topics make sense. But to have hundreds of sites on exactly the same topic? Well, that just seems redundant to me.

In any event, the thread is an interesting read in that this webmaster is getting advice from both SEOs and Googlers on several layers of issues.

Forum discussion at Google Webmasters Help.