Help with 50 Plus Penalty, No Manual Action Reported

[roundabout]

We have a client who had been ranking in Google’s top ten organic results for 2 of his major keywords last year. Currently Bing and Yahoo ranks his site #1 for both of these terms; the ranking pages that are appearing were specifically targeted with these words.

As of now, the client appears to have a 50 plus penalty for these two keywords. Appearing #76 for one term and # 60 for the other.

We were thinking of submitting a reconsideration request through Google Webmaster tools, but discovered that you aren’t allowed to do that unless a Manual Action has appeared, which in this case has not.

The only problem we’ve had with the site from an SEO standpoint is that we recently discovered a website that had copied some of the product descriptions verbatim. The client contacted the site owner who took it down immediately (about a month ago), but we still have not seen any improvement in rankings for these keywords.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to communicate this Google and get the suspected penalty lifted if a reconsideration request is apparently not available?

[Carson-Ward]

You've probably solved this already, but you first need to figure out whether it's a Panda or a Penguin penalty. This is probably a link-based penalty, but I can't say without seeing the site. If so, you'll want to work on link removal. A good place to start are on links with a high spam score. Try to get them removed, and add any spammy/purchased links to a disavow.

Let me know if you still need some eyes on it.

[ecommercebc]

It's an older term, but usually used to refer to when your website dropped by around 50 spots in G. It's not fun & here's a webmasterworld breakdown of one: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4366131.htm

[mathamatix]

Pardon my ignorance but what's a  50 plus penalty?