Am I penalized? Need a nudge in the right direction please.

Long story short:
5 months website rising slowly but steady. (It has 30 backlinks AT BEST)

On 8 June I built 2 web 2.0s and a couple of other weak-ish links. (pointed at inner pages)
On 15 June I made a reddit post which got me 200 visits (I believe that could be relevant, social signals and whatnot)
On June 22 the whole site moved upwards(Mostly the root page)

It danced around 10-30 for a couple of days with overoptimized articles, i'll admit that.

On June 24 i changed the keyword density and it started plummeting as you can see in the picture (Rankings are worse then they're ever been in the past 2 months).
I also asked about an anchor issue before: http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/black-hat-seo/773069-www-vs-non-www-anchors.html

The site has 20 articles, there might be a problem with the content as it's pretty similar in structure (Whole site is based around 1 product category, think best product for women, best product for kids, best product for kids with skateboards, how to use product), so I might be caught in Panda refresh;I heard it's supposed to be happening this week.

I have NO IDEEA what's the problem. There are so many things that could be wrong.
Of course there's aren't any messages in WT, it would be funny if someone came to the 3rd page of G to put a penalty on my site.

Am I beating a dead unicorn here?
If it's an anchor issue i might buy some web 2.0s for the marketplace to dilute them, but if the site is dead in the water then i'll save myself 50 bucks.

New sites are taking long to rank. It's just how it is these days. They want you to buy adwords in the meantime.

They take longer but they should eventually rank.

Also something i forgot to add: I added another article in July, indexed in 10 hours and ranked #15 for the keyword. 2 days later it's gone. Not even in top 300.

Something is very wrong here.

RoadAvenger said:

They take longer but they should eventually rank.

Also something i forgot to add: I added another article in July, indexed in 10 hours and ranked #15 for the keyword. 2 days later it's gone. Not even in top 300.

Something is very wrong here.

Click to expand...

That's normal behavior, it happens to me too, a new post or paged once indexed gets to 2 or 3 page, a day or two later to 90 or 100. And it doesn't move until I build some links to it.

Happens, you simply can't have stable rankings when your site is new. Give it time, eventually those rankings you had before will come back.

6 months and done, your site will rank.

Be patient... just a little more patient. Results would start coming. Moreover, it is rare for Google to immediately penalize a new site.

It doesn't look like penalty to me, it maybe dancing. If you haven't done any spam on it, you don't need to swear about it. It might be hit by quality update or panda, but the good news is that it's easier to change things up, just deal with any possible one page issue, not just keyword density of articles, but also other keywords on theme. e.g. If you have 10 recent articles all titles have same keyword and you put it in sidebar, think about the keyword density on every page of your site....

It's normal thing dude. Wait for some days and keep building links to your site. You can rank dude..