Sneaky Affiliate Redirect - Dropped by Google?

I added some fairly dodgy redirects to an affiliate site to hide my referrer url (using a http & meta refresh) from my money site as I do not have permission use an affiliate link for that specific site. It was doing quite well and earning $200 a day, then 4 days later I was completely dropped in Google's SERPs for all pages. I removed the redirects and 5 days later I was ranking 3 times better than before.

Is it possible that Google noticed the redirects and decided to penalize me? Or was it just google doing a "reshuffle" (I've heard your site can drop away for a few days)?

The redirects are not done on my site's domain and the initial link used to leave my site is generated in javascript so not sure if google could even notice.

My Site is only 3 month old.

most probably they did, they are advancing there detecting techonlogy for things like this

It depends how did you use the redirect. If you redirected all traffic and bots then yes, they can detect. But if you only redirect real users and not the crawlers/bots then it`s not that easy to detect.

Cheers

You probably experienced something called "Google dance"