I've got a site that's about a year old. It made anywhere between $250-$350/day in adsense.

The site has about 200 indexed pages. All the articles are high quality 850-1000 words each. I know everyone thinks their on-site articles are high quality, but these truly are helpful articles to a potential reader. On-page/on-site seo is immaculate, awesome internal linking structure, supporting pages, etc etc. Wordpress theme is a custom thesis theme.

Backlink portfolio is very diverse typical blog networks, my own army of high pr high quality web 2.0 sites, social bookmarking power accounts, guest blogging, etc. If there are any spam blog comments or forum profiles, they were not done by me. All articles on blog networks using spun articles, however spun articles are extremely high quality and every version is 100% readable and quality. I don't believe in spouting out garbage unreadable spun articles to backlink my site. I'm very cautious about this.

And my anchor text variation is very very diverse, 20/20/20/20/20 (20% exact match, 20% partial match, 20% broad match, 20% URL only, 20% singular/plural).

Only monetization right now is adsense.

Recently (about 10 days ago), my site started dancing for all it's major keywords. Some keywords got shot back to oblivion, and some got sent back to page 2. They are mostly dancing - as in you don't see them on a steady page 5-10 at any time. Some of them will go back to page 1 for a brief period. I've still got some page 1 rankings, but most of my money terms are gone to page 2-3. My MAIN phrase (the one that made me the most money), is now sitting at #8-12, instead of #1. Occasionally, it will go back to #1 for a few hours. The site now makes maybe $20-30/day in adsense.

This is what *I think* happened, and triggered some type of filter on my site:

I scheduled backlinking on about 10 main pages of my site through ALN. Each main page had 3-4 posts per week scheduled out months in advance (most until March-ish). ALN's schedule feature stopped working the day after, and ALL of my posts that were scheduled went out at once. So, in essence, I got thousands of backlinks from ALN blogs over a 2-3 day period, instead of drip-fed through their system. 2 days after this blast, 85% of my keyword phrases / pages jumped. Needless to say I was pretty pissed.

I don't really know what to make of it. I've seen penalties before, and it pretty much affects the whole site, and all keyword phrases, and you don't have page 1-2 rankings - as in 99% of your phrases get sent to page 5 or above.

For this particular site, however, I do have several page 2 rankings, and a few page 1 rankings still. The page 2 rankings occasionally jump back to page 1 to their original rankings once every couple days for a few hours.With that said, I do have other pages that are nowhere to be found as well. It's all pretty random.

What do you guys think? Penalty or Dance?

I think it is penalty. Getting 350 to 30 means 1/10 of traffic. You can also ask via webmaster tools for clarification i suppose.

Right - but the only thing that keeps me thinking a penalty - is the fact that a lot of my terms went from page 1, to page 2. I've penalties before, and the pages go from page 1 to page 5-10 (-50, or -100 penalty). I've never had a penalty that just dropped a few positions or 1 page if that. It's so weird and random.

penalty is right answer for u

How old is your domain name? I've blasted way too many backlinks at a new site before, and seen some temporary Google dancing, but nothing permanent. It's not likely that Google indexed thousands of backlinks in one day, but that depends on whether they were pinged or not. Not familiar with ALN's system.

Domain is a little over a year old. But it has some pretty major authority. It was used to getting hundreds of quality backlinks every day - 30-40% of those coming from organic. I get a lot of people backlinking to me due to the high quality of the content.

Assuming it's a penalty - do I just wait it out?

Also - I've had penalties in the past - and they do NOT act like this at all. When I've had sites penalized...every page it was ranking for goes between page 5-10. Absolutely no page 1 or even page 2 rankings. However, on this site - I still have plenty of page 1 rankings, and some really competitive phrases that were mid page 1 before, are now page 2. If the site was penalized - wouldn't those phrases go to page 5-10? The most competitive phrase is sitting at #8-12 depending on the hour of the day. It was #1-3 before - and that page still ranks #1-#5 for all it's other related phrases. Seems like a dance to me - but then again, dancing doesn't necessarily act like this either =/

Those ALN posts were blasted to hundreds if not thousands of sites, who's homepage was anywhere between 1-5. It's like BMR, where your post stays on the homepage for a certain amount of time. So I got thousands of homepage pr1-5 pretty much overnight to the site. And the fact that my site has NEVER danced whatsoever, and it did so 2 days after getting those ALN posts blasted - leaves me to believe ALN was the culprit. Their damn schedule feature broke, and it really shot me in the foot =/

Looks like it's a dance. A few of my keywords have returned today - the main one is at #4 - as well as some others that were in oblivion are back on page 1-2.

Hope it sticks. I'm expecting it to keep dancing for the next week or 2 though, as dances go in my experience.

i think its the dance. in my experience whenever google detects a large influx of backlinks the algorithm kind of goes nuts trying to figure out where to put you. after awhile things typically straighten out. that being said, i've scrapeboxed a brand new site and had it dissappear for 3+ months before.

Yep, dance.

Pages that were nowhere to be found yesterday, are popping back up onto page 3-5 now. Some of the phrases that got hit from page 1 to page 5-10, are now back on page 2, climbing back up.

My main phrase that was #1 before this fiasco, is still at #4 - which is still up from page 2 during the dance. So Income is at about 40% of usual now, compared to the 10% it was a couple days ago.

I'll wait another 2-4 weeks before I expect the whole round of pages to be back to normal.

I'm still not 100% wholly convinced it's not a penalty, but it's looking more and more like a dance to me.

If this were a penalty then your rankings wouldn't show any signs of recovery so soon. Plus there wouldn't be much of a dance going on either, unless you call bouncing between 300 and 350 a dance.

Yea it's gotta be some sort of dance. My main phrase is back on page 2, after being on page 1 for 2 days straight. Pretty indicitave of a dance. I think my site has some decent authority, so hopefully it doesn't last long. I've had sites that danced for almost 6 months - that would absolutely KILL the income on this site. Was hoping to sell it in March too, ah well.