The absence of a benefit is not a penalty.

You raised some really great points and explained about the penalty very well. It will help a lot to remove the misconceptions about google penalty now.

Yup and too many think they deserve 1st page

Good point!

On something not directly related, reminded me of something I read somewhere "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence"

I can't agree with you on this one. You gave the $100 comparison, but that's not quite accurate. If a website had been ranking for 2 years in a row on the top position and all the sudden it's nowhere in the top 100, than I would certainly say that it has been penalized. It's more like letting your child watch cartoons, but when he does something bad, you don't let him anymore and this will go on until the child starts behaving properly. That is a punishment (or penalty) and it's a fairly similar case to Google penalties. You do something against Google rules the "punish" you for it until you don't do it anymore. In this post https://plus.google.com/+MattCutts/posts/NAWunDzJSHC Matt Cutts says that "In response, the webspam team has taken manual action to demotewww.google.com/chrome for at least 60 days." That also sounds like a penalty and that's what they do to all sites.

If I went from the first page down to the second I would not consider that a penalty but so many websites disappeared from search engine results you have to assume that they were penalized or if you want to call it filtered out

Saying that "that thing no longer provides the benefit it once did" probably mislead me into thinking that you were, in fact, saying that penalties do not exist. It's not that it doesn't provide that benefit anymore, but Google clearly states that sites will be penalized if they use deceptive practices: As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results.
While there are those who say "I used to be ranked at the top of Google, and now I'm on the second page!" and in their case you are correct, saying that "Oh, XYZ used to work, but now Google penalizes you for it!" is not wrong. Before every algorithm update, Google gives a pretty good idea regarding what kind of SERP manipulation technique the update will target and penalize, so there's nothing hypothetical about that.

Sorry but you are way off base on this I do not know where to start.

First off every webmaster as well as search engines gets its guidance by following W3.org Web Standards. These give the elements for all search engines to check and for webmaster to follow. Search engines are keyword based, this is the whole system to base search results as well as webmasters to optimize for SEO. To be in compliance.

Google takes these elements and standards, obliterates some practices, as well as implements new ones.

Now contrary to your gift giving view, the fact is serp weight has always weighed on these elements since the inception of the Internet. It is a standard and not a Gift.

Penalties are stated by Google in black and white. These penalties are put in place for those that do not follow Their Changes on Their System.

Now lets dive into the EMD update. EMDs, especially aged EMDs are not gimmics, yes they can be used that way, but EMDs often represent business names.
Take for instance all the brick and mortar businesses out there that have static sites. They are not content sites, not there to swindle people, but to represent as a base for contact. There position now is zero. Did they deserve to be blown off of Google?

How about new sites in the making? Should they be penalized because they do not have X amount of Index Pages, X amount of backlinks? You have to start somewhere.

I pointed some of this out yesterday to Matt Cutts as well as the effects these do on global economics
People have the right to complain about these updates because they change the standards we are accustomed too. They affect peoples lively hood as well as their investments.

If OP is saying that the EMD update (or whatever you call the past week's update) is a removed benefit rather than a penalty, I would disagree.

As much as I can tell, Google is punishing sites for certain factors, EMD, PMD, on-page, off-page, etc. I see a lot of affected sites dropping 950 in rank. A lot of these sites are not poor in content either. If it's just a removed benefit, I doubt that so many sites would have ended up ranking at the very bottom, even below pages that are not relevant to the keywords searched.

Yes you pointed out a great information here. Then why people again doing this, I don't understand why people work against the Google policies and after get hit run down again and again. I only want to say if people do ethical work there is no need to worry any of Panda, Penguin updates.

you have shared some really good points.

I hate the word penalty when talking about ranking sites. I know, Google uses it but I don't see it as a penalty. More like an opportunity lost. I also hate the use of the words indexed/de-indexed used in these forums because that's not really what's happening. A poor choice of words but only because of my database background.

When talking about a site being indexed, it simply means that it's in the database. Google knows about it, has visited it and gathered information about it in order to rank it.

Now if a page ranks highly (pages are ranked, not sites as a whole) it's only because it scores well on all the factors (you call them benefits, I don't like it but hey) that Google considers compared to other pages. If the page loses that ranking, it's not because of being de-indexed. The page is still in the database, it's just that now, it doesn't score as well as it used to be. There's no "penalty", simply a change of how the page scores in some of those factors.

There are a few reasons why a page would lose or gain ranking. The major one is a change in how Google calculates those rankings. They are always doing that and any change will have an impact on some pages. For example, if a new ranking factor is a having white characters on a blue background (bad so if you don't have that combination, you score high on that factor), all those pages that do have white on blue will lose a bit. Those which don't might gain a little.

Note it may be that you score the same as before, it may just be that others are now scoring better. And you are not de-indexed if you don't see your page being ranked anymore. You just are majorly not scoring well at all. The page is still in the database, you simply need to figure out the factors that made you lose that ranking and make some changes. Sqnwk used filtered out. In databases, filter out means to completely remove from the results based on some criteria. I don't believe that's what's happening but, to use another database term, your order has changed.

Now you are right about people thinking they rank well or not because of a single factor. You can't make an assumption as to why something worked or not because of one thing. Ranking pages is more complicated than that.

Great post. There really truly are a lot of people using exactly the wrong words to describe situations.

Are they morons? Are they simply ignorant? Perhaps they only speak ESL. Either way, it tends to make discussions lose their meaning quickly. Removing the 'boost' once given to EMDs in no way penalized anyone's site.