Could This Be Anything But a Google Penalty?

I have a review site that is about 10 months old, and was ranking #1-3 for a quite a few product related keywords. For the past 3 days, every single page on my website dropped heavily, and I mean way outside the bounds of normal fluctuation or slight algorithm changes... let's just say that only a couple of my pages are even in the top 100 for their keywords. Most are ranked lower than 200, according to my market samurai rank tracker.

The website is still fully indexed, and it still comes up #1 for its domain name.

This has never happened to me before. I know new sites do weird things, but this isn't a new site. I've also had strange ranking issues with single web pages even on older sites, but never the entire site at the same time.

I promote this site the same way that I promote all of my other sites, and they're all looking good.

It's been like this for 3 days now (the drops happened on every page overnight simultaneously), so I'm thinking that this must be some sort of penalty imposed by a manual review... could it be anything else? Has anyone had a website that basically goes to hell in the rankings and comes back on its own, excluding brand new sites? It'd be a shame if this website is now dead weight, but I just want to know if I should move on or have hope or what.

If this is indeed a google penalty, then I'm sort of scared, because that means it could happen to any of my sites at any time.

Thanks in advance for any help or advice

The first thing u need to do is check your G Webmaster account and see if all you pages are really indexed. I hope you are not going by the site: command to check which pages are indexed as this is not always up to date and can give you misleading info. Ur webmasters account is the ONLY place you need to be checking.

Also check the number of links your GW account shows, if there was a drastic change than that is most probably the cause of ur problems.

If ur whole domain got hammered, not just some pages that this might be a duplicate penalty. Do you have a lot of content on ur pages? If you don't or if you have repeating content from page to page, internally, than this is the root cause of ur problems. Just add 200 words on so on each page if that is possible and u'll be back in no time.

If ur GW account seems fine and you are sure you are not shooting urself in the foot with duplicate content on ur site, just wait for a couple more days and ur site will be back to normal.

Hope this helps!

If you care to share ur url i can probably give u more info.

I'm afraid it's not looking good. Google certainly do apply manual reviews to review sites. In fact, they are cracking down heavily on that area. I lost a news site which was 2 years old, it had an alexa of 4000, and it just got obliterated in one day.

There is one hope though. One of my older sites suddenly lost its rankings, but I found out it was because I had too many outbound links to my other sites in the same niche. I removed just a single outbound link, and hey presto, I came straight back. So hopefully you've been messing about with it and its something you've done that can be rectified. But if not, my condolences! Move on and build another site.

Thanks for the replies.

Michaellef, unfortunately I haven't made any real changes other than adding new content, and don't link out from this site to my other stuff. Wish I could say otherwise. I was thinking that this could be related to recent "pressure" from outside forces on review type sites. If this is how it's got to go down I'll definitely be moving on, I'll just have to have a "moment of silence" first because this one site that got taken out happened to be my biggest earner. Just after I was having a record month, and really thinking my life was about to significantly improve. NOT cool, google

Also, the site is at least slightly better than the ones who inherited my rankings, so I feel a bit unlucky and picked on