Google penalty ( Or a new update )

HI guys i have read this horror stories here a lot and i guess now its time for me to post one..Bare in mind im fucking sick to my stomach so if you find and typing errors forgive me ..

Just got back home and as usually i check rankings and stats and i see my main money maker went from positions 1-3 to page 5-6 for all keywords... This site has been around for almost 2 years and i took really good care of it getting it just links from authority sites,almost no exact match anchors plus in at least 6-7 months all the links it got was natural ones even from big sites like Huff.Post , many forums etc..Only thing i can think of is another site i had for testing purposes which was on a same hosting account and registered with same domain provider..That site also ranked first for its keyword but i used a lot of pbns and other stuff on it and i see that site also on page 5 ...

Why i think it might be update or something done by google on a bigger scale is that i see also many more sites that were ranking around me on a page 5 also ...

Any advice on what to do with my main site that had solid earnings and great link profile would be much appreciated ..

If every keyword dropped it is most likely a penalty. If you're confident in your link profile, look at other factors. Is your content thin? Are there other issues with your hosting/.htacess/robots.txt? Have you checked your link profile to see if theres any negative SEO going on?

from that positions to page 5-6 looks like a manual penalty from here. I might be (and I hope I`m) wrong. wait for a while, create a gwt account and add there and check for messages. Assuming you haven't done so already.

Yes checked pretty much everything...All the links in past few months i got are natural ones like from other great sites and forums where people where linking back to the content which is all over 1000 words and ,in my honest opinion , very informative which was the reason for people to link back to that site..Like i said my main suspect is that other site i had and i think google slapped that one and in a process linked that site with my main one from whois data and hosting account...

If it is some penalty ( being manual or algorithm ) what should be my next step..Abandon the site all together , 301 to new domain or some third option ??

oscilay said:

from that positions to page 5-6 looks like a manual penalty from here. I might be (and I hope I`m) wrong. wait for a while, create a gwt account and add there and check for messages. Assuming you haven't done so already.

Click to expand...

Yeah i think youre right it all seems like manual penalty..But like i said i also see like 10 other sites in same niche dropped around page 5 also...Added the site in gwt about an hour ago and no new messages in there...

Sudden drops in rankings like that are unnatural and when you get a penalty it always seems to drop you to page 5-6.

It looks like a penalty to me.

It is for sure...Any advice on what to do next ???

pike222 said:

It is for sure...Any advice on what to do next ???

Click to expand...

just wait and see before you do anything crazy

I will but i dont think its coming back tough ...Thanks for your help Pixel i really do appreciate it..

If you checked google webmaster tools, and you have nothing under manual actions (sometimes the penalty appears in the manual actions before you receive a message or an email) it's probably an algorithmic one.

I have had some small sites penalized as well today, but being that i have a large portfolio, that's natural, but they were all accompanied by manual actions taken in webmaster tools.

If it's a manual action --> try to use the reconsideration request function.
If it's algorithmic --> harder to pinpoint.

Usually 301 redirect are a last resort and you never get back the same rankings as before, unless you invest massively in the new sites. But they are helpful when you see no other chance.