Getting Slighly Penalized While Not Doing Anything?

One of my sites picked off without me even doing much as far as off page SEO is concerned. In the first months I concentrated on writing a ton of content targeting hundreds of different low competition keywords, and I managed to naturally rank a good portion of my articles, and didn't need to do much link building at all. The site constantly, though, attracts natural backlinks, and today, for the first time ever, I've noticed it to be a problem. A few days ago, my site was ranking #1 for a few thousand searches a month keyword with a few naturally gained backlinks. Today, though, it's on the 4th position. When I started to investigate what might have caused the drop in rankings, I noticed that the article had recently gained a new backlink from a pagerank 4 website. The problem is, though, that all of the backlinks to that article have keyword rich anchor texts. In fact, 80% of the anchors are an exact match for the keyword the article is targeting.

What do you guys think? Has that article been hit by some kind of a penalty? Should I disavow that backlink? Should I build a few backlinks in order to diversify the anchor texts?

Not going to say it was a "penalty" as most people say it but there are rumblings that an update (penguin?) is happening right now. It could be that penguin came through again and re-ranked you. That being said, going from 1 to 4 isn't really that bad... rankings fluctuate constantly and with hummingbird and things like personalization you might still be in the first position for other people. The real question is has your traffic dropped off. not gone down 5% compared to yesterday, I mean 60% for the whole week.

Before I get carried away I'll make a potential long story a short story. I doubt you got penalized and if you did get re ranked by penguin it was the mildest adjustment I've ever seen. No need to freak out, if you're worried diversify your back link profile and anchor text.

You said some unsuspecting links were added to your site and if you did not put them there then someone else did and now
it is messing up your page rank. So what you need to do is remove the link and then add more content.

-RK

You can not say that you are penalized if you just fell down 3 positions, thats only a minor dance, or other site ranking in front of you.. Come back to us if you drop to 5th or 10th page and than say : "Am i penalized ?" ...

Cheers

are you sure that's the reason? And why would a penalty take you down only 3 positions? Seems like an average fluctuation

The latest update has been pretty substantial. It started on the 10th and has been rolling ever since. The latest update is giving more weight to authority sites, and showing more local searches for high level broad terms. Also seeing a ton of Yahoo Answers and FB pages ranking now.

Couple things to note from OP. One, 99% of all loss in rankings is algorithmic. When you get a penalty you will know it. Also, as much as you say it isn't a big deal, losing the #1 ranking and dropping to the #4 position is a huge deal, especially on the high level coveted terms. In some niches you are talking about a 50%+ drop off in traffic from #1 to #4. Yes, it isn't the end of the world, but for a big business, this can be a huge loss in revenue.

Don't build more links now! By the sounds of it you have obtained pretty solid rankings, by real natural links. For your particular niche 80% exact anchor text may be the norm. Give it some time before trying to artificially change things around...As everyone else has said, it doesn't sound like a penalty at all. Just keep adding quality content to your site...after the dance you may notice you are #1 for a few more keywords too...