Sandbox or Penalty?

My site has been up for about half a yr now. Up until about a month ago, I was holding PR2. Then all of the sudden, it dropped to PR0. (this was before the last big update came through a few weeks ago) Some of my pages PR are "not ranked" but a lot of my most vital landing pages went to PR0.

I am not getting any warning messages from google but i did find some not so SEO friendly stuff to fix such as: duplicate metas and a bunch of junk sites backlinking to me without my awareness. So i fixed most of the duplicates (mostly query/parameter stuff) and sent out a "remove me" notice to the junk sites as well as a disavow list to google.

So now I wait. But I was wondering if anyone could help me or point me in the right direction to find out if i've been penalized or just sandboxed.

Much thanks in advance.

It is hard to answer your question. I am working with a client now that has several thousand spammy backlinks. Their rankings and traffic dropped off months ago and just last week I received a message in webmaster tools that they are being penalized. So it is possible you are being penalized. My suggestion would be to begin the process of getting those spammy links removed.

Since you hadn't received any notification in GWT, it could be the case that your site was sandboxed. More to that, links from bad neighborhood is one of the most common reasons for that, plus your site is relatively new.

You can also go through the following checks in Google: (1) info:mysite.com; (2) site:mysite.com and (3) cache:mysite.com. If the search doesn't match any listings, documents and cache results for these queries, this is an indicator that your site has been penalized.

If penalty turns to be the issue, the following article offers sound advice on how to find out by which particular update your site was hit: http://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/ti...-google-algorithm-update-penalised-your-site/

Thanks guys. It seems that penalty is not the case but sandboxed doesn't make much sense either. Why sandbox me after 6mths? I guess all I can do is wait for the disavows and duplicate fixes to register and see what happens. Appreciate your input.

Its bizarre as you can abuse a site and see nothing and ones you work and tip toe around get hammered. It feels a bit like Google is selecting the sites that are paying Adwords!!