Lost All Google Rankings In 1 Day?

[dahlgren_m]

On of my websites was recently hit pretty F** bad.

For the last three months have been promoting this website heavily. My link building have been at a steady 5-20 Links pr day, and I have seen great increase in traffic as well as rankings.

On the 29th of November I lost all traffic and rankings in google, my site is still indexed.

Here is some of my actions before the "penalty".

1. I order 1500 Social Bookmarks for one of my newest articles. ( I wanted to check if it would increase the ranking rate for new articles)

Without promotion and if I pick the right keyword, my new articles/reviews are indexed in a couple of hours and reach page 1/2 in three to 7 days.

2. I ordered an Senuke x service to three of my older reviews, around 1500 links in total, but in a link pyramid.

3. My 30 Homepage backlinks pointing at my top domain were removed due to paypal error, I lost a lot of link juice there.

( Once these links are up again I hope my rankings will return.)

As you can see I did a lot of actions right before the "penalty", and I suspect some of it to cause my sudden rank drop.

What I am asking is if anyone have more experience with this kind of pattern?

Does this kind of link increase and decrease cause these drastic movements?

Here are some stats for my website:

1. The reviews/info articles are divided into 70/30
2. My website is 1 year old. I have about 24 live articles.

[lovboa]

Don't worry it will come back. There is always this kind of activity i.e. disappear or thrown way back for awhile after some heavy link building activity. Especially since your site is only a year old. Wait for it to come back to a new high!

[Mike Anthony]

Originally Posted by lovboa

Don't worry it will come back. There is always this kind of activity i.e. disappear or thrown way back for awhile after some heavy link building activity. Especially since your site is only a year old. Wait for it to come back to a new high!

This is a popular always stated myth. Sites that do blasts do NOT always come back and they most definitely do not always come back to a new high.
There have been multiple people in this forum who have reported their sites not coming back and some have even gotten link spam penalties complete with messages from Google telling them their sites have been tagged.

http://searchengineland.com/google-w...our-site-84265

Sure many come back but you guys need to stop parroting this idea that every time ANY site vanishes from the serps its a dance thats automatically good and means your site will come back higher. Wake up, The game has been changing with Panda and you are still singing the same ole song.

It may or it may not but drops are NOT an indication that your dreams are about to come true

[adsenselive]

that's some fairly heavy link building you've got going on there and just wonder whether the latest Google panda update has slapped your site down as a result. Hope it comes back for you, one of mine took a heavy hit after the first update then came back higher within 7 days

[dahlgren_m]

Thank you for your answers!

It's hard to pin point exactly why this happened, and it always will be. Lets hope it returns before christmas


What do you think is the best actions to perform with my website while it's in this state?

[outwest]

Sorry but why would you order blasts of 1000s of links and not think this would be considered spammy

I would much more feel comfortable with 5 links a day by BMR than blasting 1000s of links
\
if you "order" links from other people you have no control over how fast they put up the links or where they put them , either

[InTheMaking]

Regardless of what everyone said here,

to pin-point it I would say it was the 1500 socialbookmarkings. Since the recent update me and a few other SEO'ers which I talk to daily have been experiencing the same thing with Socialbookmarks.

My Opinion anyway.

[rjones46]

Your site should re-appear soon.

[Carys501]

Hey don't worry, it happened to me but within two weeks it has solved.

Thanks

[BigNorm]

My suggestion to your problem would be to drip feed high quality links to your site, 50-100 per day and begin adding more quality content. Google will reward you for it, plus what keywords you've lost rankings for you can make up by ranking new keywords with new content which will have a trickle down effect and help move your lost rankings back up through the serps. Never blast your sites, it's just not worth the risk nowadays, especially when someone promises 1500 bookmarks because I guarantee, 97% of those links will be rubbish spammy sites. Patience is now your best weapon when it comes to ranking sites.

[seoed]

yes, your only chance to revive rankings is to get quality backlinks like guest posts on blogs:

Guest blogging: Looking for guest bloggers or guest post? Join MyBlogGuest!

what you can do:

make those backlinks stronger with additional "mass" backlinks.

[outwest]

I would say "ordering" blasts of links
is akin to
giving control of your finances to another person, who then loots your account

or its like renting your house out, the tenants dont own it and think nothing of trashing it

nobody cares about the quality of your links like you would care
handing that over to someone else to me is a bit dangerous

Its giving away the keys to your site to someone else, because backlinks considered spammy, or from "bad neighborhoods" are extremely frowned on by google

why not just give the username pass to your wordpress access to someone? Of course you would never do that

[Dmreed4311]

wow im gonna do exactly what you did but to my competition and get all the way to #1

[Welsh Warrior]

Originally Posted by outwest

Sorry but why would you order blasts of 1000s of links and not think this would be considered spammy

This is my experience as well - these days it is a case of spamming them to a 'buffer', such as a squidoo lens, and building up the power of that to power up it's link to you. The 'pyramid' style, though not quite as regimented so it looks a bit more natural

[Bambu]

How far did your keyword rankings drop?

How many direct links were pointing to your site from the pyramid? If the pyramid only had <100 links pointing to the two pages I don't think that would result in a penalty.

With regards to social bookmark blasts, it has been my experience that initially you see really big gains in the SERPs, but they usually drop back down rather quickly. I have not done any SB blasts since the Google algorithm change in early November. Of course this observation would not explain why all of your SERPs have been effected.

The decrease in SERPs may also simply be due to the loss of your home page network backlinks and the accompanying loss of link juice in internally linked pages from your website.

Let us know if you see any movement once you get your home page network backlinks back up.

Good luck!

[Mike Anthony]

Originally Posted by Dmreed4311

wow im gonna do exactly what you did but to my competition and get all the way to #1

Won't work because Good links in their link portfolio actually help to dampen the effect of blasts. You can't for example bring Adobe down because they already have great high authority links. Its sites that don't have them that get tanked.

You won't rank number 1 in your serp because the site ahead of you have better links if you check your carpet site for example. Same reason why you are not ranking as well.

[dp40oz]

Originally Posted by Mike Anthony

Won't work because Good links in their link portfolio actually help to dampen the effect of blasts. You can't for example bring Adobe down because they already have great high authority links. Its sites that don't have them that get tanked.

You won't rank number 1 in your serp because the site ahead of you have better links if you check your carpet site for example. Same reason why you are not ranking as well.

Exactly! The old saying "well links cant hurt your site because if they could I could just penalize my competition blah blah blah". Links can hurt but if your site has a lot of authority it's much much harder. That's why it's difficult to hurt your competition with links because usually your competition that u want to hurt is ranking well and therefore probably has decent authority.

As far as the OPs site goes. On the 29th Google did another big update and lots of sites got penalized.

[watson229]

Same problem happened to me but after about 10 days I got my good ranks back. So have patience and you will definitely get that again.

[nasir khan]

After heavy link building activity this sort of things happen but it will go up again.

[rasel786]

Don't worry dude i think your problem will solve very soon.

[Barry Unruh]

Originally Posted by dahlgren_m

3. My 30 Homepage backlinks pointing at my top domain were removed due to paypal error, I lost a lot of link juice there.

( Once these links are up again I hope my rankings will return.)

OUCH!!!

Your site may have survived some of the other activities if this had not coincided with it. As Mike Anthony pointed out having good links softens the blow of lower quality links to your site.

How soon are those links going live again?

Barry

[Illuminart]

It's just natural. You'll see them up again sooner or later, if nothing changed/ Then, there's something really wrong.

[timwilson38]

I think its due to heavy link building in single day, wait for few days, it will come back to normal.

[dahlgren_m]

Originally Posted by Bambu

How far did your keyword rankings drop?

How many direct links were pointing to your site from the pyramid? If the pyramid only had <100 links pointing to the two pages I don't think that would result in a penalty.

With regards to social bookmark blasts, it has been my experience that initially you see really big gains in the SERPs, but they usually drop back down rather quickly. I have not done any SB blasts since the Google algorithm change in early November. Of course this observation would not explain why all of your SERPs have been effected.

The decrease in SERPs may also simply be due to the loss of your home page network backlinks and the accompanying loss of link juice in internally linked pages from your website.

Let us know if you see any movement once you get your home page network backlinks back up.

Good luck!

Total links pointing to my site from the pyramid is roughly 45. I don't believe thats the reason my site dropped.

I'l let you know ones my links are up.

Originally Posted by dp40oz

Exactly! The old saying "well links cant hurt your site because if they could I could just penalize my competition blah blah blah". Links can hurt but if your site has a lot of authority it's much much harder. That's why it's difficult to hurt your competition with links because usually your competition that u want to hurt is ranking well and therefore probably has decent authority.

As far as the OPs site goes. On the 29th Google did another big update and lots of sites got penalized.

That means the "penalty" might be more sever than I expected.?

Originally Posted by Barry Unruh

OUCH!!!

Your site may have survived some of the other activities if this had not coincided with it. As Mike Anthony pointed out having good links softens the blow of lower quality links to your site.

How soon are those links going live again?

Barry

I'm hoping yesterday I have set up the new payment and it should be sorted out quickly, the links dropped on the 29th and I set up the new payment on the 30th.

I have contacted the owner of the network, let's hope its sorted soon.

This is what I plan to do today:

Write two 1000words articles without affiliate links.

Also, I have set up a daily drip of 10-15 "authority" links from a blog network.

Let's see how it goes.

[dahlgren_m]

Originally Posted by Illuminart

It's just natural. You'll see them up again sooner or later, if nothing changed/ Then, there's something really wrong.

I'm not sure why everyone is saying this is "natural" I have 24 pages on my website, all rankings where dropped to page 50+, except for one that's still on page 1 rank 1.

Is it natural if google decide to penalize my website I get to keep 1 keyword for top ranking?

The last time I got penalized ( for a different site ) I didn't have all that many backlinks, but only reviews without info articles, my site reappeared in the serps after 5 months.

I try to avoid that now by focusing on user experience, I have about 50/50 reviews and info articles, I hope I'm not in for another 5 months, it's my top earning site.

[Barry Unruh]

Originally Posted by dahlgren_m

Is it natural if google decide to penalize my website I get to keep 1 keyword for top ranking?

Is that keyword on a separate page? How does your link profile for that page differ from the others?

Have you noticed a decrease in the number of backlinks you see listed to your pages which tumbled in the rankings?

Many people were recently reporting seeing a lot of their profile, social bookmark, and directory links disappearing from their backlinks reports, as if Google was "discounting" or "no longer counting" those links.

The item I would be most curious about would be what changed in your backlinks from higher PR sources.

As an example...If you were doing a bunch of Build My Rank link building and then stopped you could suddenly see a big change in your overall PR backlink profile. The posts which were sitting on the front page of these higher PR blogs have now rolled off their front page which means you lose the PR benefit of the link.

It may not be a penalty at all, just an adjustment based upon changes which have occurred quickly in your back link quality.

[G Singh]

Originally Posted by dahlgren_m

3. My 30 Homepage backlinks pointing at my top domain were removed due to paypal error, I lost a lot of link juice there.

( Once these links are up again I hope my rankings will return.)

My personal opinion is that it's not so much the blasts that have impacted your site. It's the above where you lost your homepage backlinks.

Once you get them back up and wait a few weeks you may see improvements in your ranking.

A lot of people look at what links you've built as a cause for the drop and forget about the links you've lost. You need to realise that negative link velocity plays a role in rankings too.

[dahlgren_m]

Originally Posted by Barry Unruh

Is that keyword on a separate page? How does your link profile for that page differ from the others?

Have you noticed a decrease in the number of backlinks you see listed to your pages which tumbled in the rankings?

Many people were recently reporting seeing a lot of their profile, social bookmark, and directory links disappearing from their backlinks reports, as if Google was "discounting" or "no longer counting" those links.

The item I would be most curious about would be what changed in your backlinks from higher PR sources.

As an example...If you were doing a bunch of Build My Rank link building and then stopped you could suddenly see a big change in your overall PR backlink profile. The posts which were sitting on the front page of these higher PR blogs have now rolled off their front page which means you lose the PR benefit of the link.

It may not be a penalty at all, just an adjustment based upon changes which have occurred quickly in your back link quality.

I rank on several key phrases on the top level domain, and it's the top level domain that still ranks for one of them. It's the keyword i Initially focused on the I started the site a year ago.

Before the DROP I ranked for the following terms:

(Keywords are just for Examples):

Pro Gaming Headset (low comp)
Gaming Headset (high Comp)
Headset (high Comp)

Now I am only ranking for the term "Pro Gaming Headset".

Backlink Portfolio

My backlink portfolio consist of mostly article syndication and some minor link diversity.

However, in october I used BMR, I posted 5 articles each day to this site, then completely stopped using it in november, you might be on to something there. Although, I ranked well for many keywords before I used BMR.

Also, I substituted BMR with another high pr networks.

Originally Posted by G Singh

My personal opinion is that it's not so much the blasts that have impacted your site. It's the above where you lost your homepage backlinks.

Once you get them back up and wait a few weeks you may see improvements in your ranking.

A lot of people look at what links you've built as a cause for the drop and forget about the links you've lost. You need to realise that negative link velocity plays a role in rankings too.

I don't know how fast the BMR links roll of the homepage, but it could be a combination of that and the homepage backlinks.

One last thing.

I started working on this site in january, but I stopped working on it in March only to pick it up again in August ( The site was ranking "naturally" for some competitive keywords, with only 5 articles on it.)

From august I have added 18 new articles/reviews as well as Off page SEO. I have been quite adamant on building backlinks as my site rose in the ranks steadily.

[linkbuildr]

From MC @ Pubcon for those mentioned certain links not showing our counting in their profile

"

Q. Everyone says I need more links. How do links improve the quality of the site? I don’t want to play this game and I don’t want to do this.


A: What matters is bottom line. Links are a part of search – they represent online reputation. Although there are many tools that report links, none of the tools can tell you which links are trusted by Google (not even Google’s tools). While the link structure looks bad from the outside, the actual linkgraph that Google uses/trusts looks much better. When the New York Times complained about a site with 10,000 spammy links, Google investigated the site and not a single link had slipped through Google’s filter. Only the links Google trusts count."

[linkbuildr]

From MC @ Pubcon for those mentioned certain links not showing our counting in their profile

"

Q. Everyone says I need more links. How do links improve the quality of the site? I don’t want to play this game and I don’t want to do this.


A: What matters is bottom line. Links are a part of search – they represent online reputation. Although there are many tools that report links, none of the tools can tell you which links are trusted by Google (not even Google’s tools). While the link structure looks bad from the outside, the actual linkgraph that Google uses/trusts looks much better. When the New York Times complained about a site with 10,000 spammy links, Google investigated the site and not a single link had slipped through Google’s filter. Only the links Google trusts count."

[dahlgren_m]

Originally Posted by jameswatson2002

Ehh, #2 may have been your problem, depending on who was doing it Senuke can be very BH and result in a penalty.

I'm not sure if it's the senuke links because It's only 45 links pointing at my money pages, the rest are pointing at tier 1.

Originally Posted by Juvv2096

Thats quite a lot of backlinks to be done at once.

Do you know if the senukex blast and the social bookmarks were all done at once, or were the dripped out?

If they were spammed out at once, then that wouldve been your problem.

Slow and consistent brings much better results rather than pushing heaps of back links out at once. Google no likey!

I ordered from two different sources. To be honest I actually thought my site could handle more heavy duty backlinking since my articles where quickly ranking without any promotion.

I guess i was wrong

Let's see what happens!

[Mike Anthony]

Originally Posted by G Singh

My personal opinion is that it's not so much the blasts that have impacted your site. It's the above where you lost your homepage backlinks.

Thats a fair point. I had missed point three. That could do it right there but it would go to show how worthless the other links were that the pages just tanked the minute the home page backlinks were removed.

[Alohatom]

Sounds like what happened to me...I threw in the towel...really depressing crap...am flipping those sites that tanked and starting over woth a new batch using super conservative kink building and emphasizing social signals, just bound SYNND and so far pretty good stuff. Sorry, but the same damn thing happened to me!

[dahlgren_m]

Originally Posted by Alohatom

Sounds like what happened to me...I threw in the towel...really depressing crap...am flipping those sites that tanked and starting over woth a new batch using super conservative kink building and emphasizing social signals, just bound SYNND and so far pretty good stuff. Sorry, but the same damn thing happened to me!

How long did you wait until you decided to flipp the site?

What measures did you do to try getting your site back up again?

I'm not giving up on this, Iv'e worked on it since august so I'l might as well work a couple of months more

[mrehan]

Originally Posted by dp40oz

Exactly! The old saying "well links cant hurt your site because if they could I could just penalize my competition blah blah blah". Links can hurt but if your site has a lot of authority it's much much harder. That's why it's difficult to hurt your competition with links because usually your competition that u want to hurt is ranking well and therefore probably has decent authority.

As far as the OPs site goes. On the 29th Google did another big update and lots of sites got penalized.

On the 29th, my site too dropped in ranking. From No. 3 on google to No. 30. All other inner pages off the charts. It is a one year old site. Must be due to the algo update. Another site I have is about 18 months old was not affected. So sometimes the drop in rankings the OP has experienced might not only be due to the link blasts.

[kissofdeath]

Theirs definitely something going on relevant to the 29th of November i have the same problem on my 2 sites here is my anylitics report

Edit* not enough posts to post images yet but check i39.tinypic.com/swpxfl.jpg

I'm not SEO expert and don't run my sites to make money, i just aim to make enough to cover my server costs, i've checked all the usual theories, it's not sandbox mode because my site is 3 years old, i do not cheat in anyway creating backlinks for myself and do not pay others to do it either, the not sure if the google panda thing would have only just hit me now as it was released months ago, 2 weeks before the drop i see that my page load speed increased by a few seconds so thought it might have been something to do with that, their was also an announcement from google on the 15th on November saying that sites with heavy advertising may be penalized in future so i thought it could possibly be something to do with that as i had a few banners and popups on my site for guest users not logged in (but always have had for the past 3 years) this is my main site i am talking about and i was so busy panicking about it i didn't think to check my other site, the other site is a lot smaller an i only get about 6000 hits from google each month, i check google anayltics and low and behold the same drastic drop on the same day, now this site does not have any banners or popups but i do use info links which i doubt could be considered as heavy advertising, and the page speed is also very good,

so then i decided to search google for "google page rank drop november" for pages made in the last 24 hours and i'm finding a load of threads similar to this one so thought i'd try and communicate with as many people having the same problem as possible, now my 2 site the only thing they have in common is that i'm running vbulletin 4 forums with vbseo on them both and i use infolinks on them both that's about it, the sites are hosted on completely different servers and are not connected in any way, their isn't even a back link between them,i havn't checked m page rank for a while as most say it's irreverent but i do track a few keywords and i've dropped back about 80 places in google for every single one of them i am still indexed my sitemap contains 97,598 urls of which 95,728 are indexed

Something else i also find strange is that io checked my yahoo, aol & bing stats at the beginning when this started happening and they were all normal, but yesterday i checked and my sites have dropped about 40 places back on those aswell, does anyone know if these search engines are directly affected by google rankings?

The only thing i can think of is that some popular high pr source has made alterations to their site possibly making them no follow? or possibly shut down completely?

Edit2* apparently their was another panda update on the 28th of November

the most annoying thing is that 3 of the sites in the top 10 for my keywords have content copied and pasted from my site (it even has my user name on the page in their sites) they've just right clicked and copied the html code ,panda was supposed to be aimed at sites scraping content from others but it does not seem to be detecting the original source correctly

[getin2learn]

Me too experienced a drop down in rankings. I have only 7 sites, between 6-12 months old, different niches, different keywords, set on 2 separate hosting companies, with quite varying backlinking plans.

All 7 sites and inner pages have mixed rankings, but for simplicity sake let's say that rankings were within the first 3 pages of results in google. All of my sites have only original, informative and quality content - and are updated regularly.

As of yesterday, everything fell down beginning from page 5 and below (in google). Yahoo and Bing results were not affected.

I can hardly imagine what went wrong or is it a temporary "glitch", but when I looked some of the sites that are now outranking me, it is sad to see what sites google has given better rank. The worst example is 2-page CPA site that now ranks #1 (instead of mine which fell from #1 to #54).

If that's the Panda update effects everyone is rumoring this year, then bravo to Google!

[BarryOnline]

Originally Posted by dahlgren_m

My 30 Homepage backlinks pointing at my top domain were removed

It could be that your site dropped due to the loss of the strong high PR links and all that is now left is spammy, low quality links pointing your your site.

This is most likely what has caused the drop.

[dahlgren_m]

Originally Posted by getin2learn

Me too experienced a drop down in rankings. I have only 7 sites, between 6-12 months old, different niches, different keywords, set on 2 separate hosting companies, with quite varying backlinking plans.

All 7 sites and inner pages have mixed rankings, but for simplicity sake let's say that rankings were within the first 3 pages of results in google. All of my sites have only original, informative and quality content - and are updated regularly.

As of yesterday, everything fell down beginning from page 5 and below (in google). Yahoo and Bing results were not affected.

I can hardly imagine what went wrong or is it a temporary "glitch", but when I looked some of the sites that are now outranking me, it is sad to see what sites google has given better rank. The worst example is 2-page CPA site that now ranks #1 (instead of mine which fell from #1 to #54).

If that's the Panda update effects everyone is rumoring this year, then bravo to Google!

That's pretty unfair if you ask me, but it seems this is the trend nowadays.!

Originally Posted by BarryOnline

It could be that your site dropped due to the loss of the strong high PR links and all that is now left is spammy, low quality links pointing your your site.

This is most likely what has caused the drop.

Yes, I would agree on that, but since my site ranked pretty well before the homepage backlinks, I would assume that at least my previous ranks would be intact. Instead the site got completely wasted, except for bing.

[dahlgren_m]

Update Per 08.12.2011

My site is back after 10 days of terror. I actually gave up on IM for a couple of minutes there

Here is what i did after the drop:

1. Changed My Theme

I don't know if this has anything to do with it, but since my previous theme had 5-10 affiliate links on my homepage I figured it'l be worth a shot to change it.

2. Re-Ordered my 30-homepage backlinks

This was initially my biggest concern when my site dropped, but I still think it's odd because my rankings before the drop where pretty good.

3. Added 2 5-700 words article without affiliate links.

I'm not sure if the site will stay, but my main keyword jumped from 5 to 2 on first page and I take that as a good sign.

What now?

If anyone have had similar experience, please share your opinion on the best practice after a "drop/penalty/sandbox" like this.

[kissofdeath]

so you removed all the affiliate homepage links completely, or just put them on another page?

[DamenRabat]

What i am wondering is.... does the content of those articles wrrnt 1500 socil bookmarks? Is it the kind of content that this many people would naturally bookmark so heavily?

The idea is always to emulate "natural" behavior and in order to get bookmarked this massively over night I´d at least expect those article to be about celebrity or that sort of thing.

[55sadhikar]

Originally Posted by DamenRabat

What i am wondering is.... does the content of those articles wrrnt 1500 socil bookmarks? Is it the kind of content that this many people would naturally bookmark so heavily?

The idea is always to emulate "natural" behavior and in order to get bookmarked this massively over night I´d at least expect those article to be about celebrity or that sort of thing.

You could be right, i have had few of my sites dropped rankings completely. They are nowwhere to be seen! All those sites were ranking either 2nd page or 5th,6th, 7th and under 10th pages. But i had some profile link building and blog commenting done, especially on high PR sites. But all those rankings completely disappeared from the existing SERPs and are nowwhere to be seen. (Although the sites pages are still indexed in google)It sinks my heart with all the money and effort of getting it ranked being gone to waste!

[dahlgren_m]

Originally Posted by kissofdeath

so you removed all the affiliate homepage links completely, or just put them on another page?

Yes I completely removed the affiliate links on my homepage, but the affiliate links pointing from inner pages I left as is.

Originally Posted by DamenRabat

What i am wondering is.... does the content of those articles wrrnt 1500 socil bookmarks? Is it the kind of content that this many people would naturally bookmark so heavily?

The idea is always to emulate "natural" behavior and in order to get bookmarked this massively over night I´d at least expect those article to be about celebrity or that sort of thing.

I agree, but to be honest I expect them to drip into googles index over a period of time, but as mentioned earlier I have no control over that unless I specifically ask for no "extra" indexing.

In this case I didn't.

[kissofdeath]

mines nothing to do with social bookmarking as i only added social bookmarking when the traffic dropped, i sent reconsideration request to google when this first happened as i thought i'd been penalized , but just got a message back from them saying my site was not penalized and no manual action was taken against me, i'm pulling my hair out as i have no idea what to do

[umrbd]

You got to read Automated SEO Vs Manual SEO! Which is Better? | Internet Marketing Blog kindly note that most of the links that we buy are create by automated submissions

[westportclan]

I lost all my rankings in one day, exactly a month ago, and today they all returned. I diversified my links, and got some high PR links and they are now all back. I'm not sure why I lost my rankings or if the backlinking caused them to return... the main thing is that they are back!

[cbright]

@dahlgren_m

I didn't read everyones responses but I wanted to respond because I ran into this same issue and it took me a month to figure out why 4 sites got hit with it all on the same day. It turned out that I had google ad placements too close to other ad networks and affiliate links so they manually penalized the sites.. after figuring it out I fixed the issue and submitted the sites for reconsideration and got all of them screaming right back into the SERPs where they were.
So I'm not sure if you are running adsense or not but ya might want to consider that if you are

[kissofdeath]

Originally Posted by westportclan

I lost all my rankings in one day, exactly a month ago, and today they all returned. I diversified my links, and got some high PR links and they are now all back. I'm not sure why I lost my rankings or if the backlinking caused them to return... the main thing is that they are back!

SO all you did was back linking, you didn't change the site at all?

ho far did you drop back?

[icosane]

I had a site in the #2 spot for the last few months, made the site in July. I did lots of backlinking the first month or two but then completely stopped. I haven't done a single thing related to backlinks for months. Last week I added an extra page of content to my site. Then I noticed a few days ago that my homepage had been completely booted from the top 300 search listings for my main keyword. My site still shows up if I search for my exact domain, so I'm not sure I was "sandboxed."

So whatever they're doing at google with the rankings isn't specifically related to backlinks. My site was a bit spammy with ads but had original content and my stats for time on site and bounce rates were pretty good. Honestly the top ranking sites for my keyword now kinda suck so I hope google undoes whatever they're experimenting with.