Sound like you got a -950 penalty, to be honest i'd just make another site and forget about the current one. If it eventually comes good then great, if not at least you're not sitting there with no traffic, no revenue banging your head against the wall.
It seems that google is doing its 4th quarter pagerank update. My sites are getting yo-yo-ed around on keyword terms. But just in case, check list for you ... 1) Do you have duplicate content? 2nd website out there with the same info (or data on same site rehashed in a different way)? If so you can lose pages indexed and lose placement in serps 2) Anything you're doing that might be considered blackhat? i.e. showing google one thing and showing visitors to your website something else? entry pages with redirects? 3) Would your website pass a personal review of a human without looking like its built mainly for search engines?
Okay, this is why I think I got the penalty. I do buy links, less then 2 per month, and high quality, relevant links. However, that is the only way I could rank up. That is not even close to everything I do for SEO though. I update with unique content everyday. I have also gotten listed in high quality directories like Yahoo and Business.com, and the website is over 8 months old, so it is not a new website. How could only 2 new links a month cause Google to -950 penalty me? Also, if it is a -950 penalty, how can I get rid of it? How long should I wait before I send a re-inclusion request? What do I say? If I wait long enough, and cease all buying of links, keep updating content, etc... Will the penalty go away eventually?
It's really hard to say, there's a thread over on WebmasterWorld.com spanning over 50 pages and been going on for like 18+ months with people pulling their hair out over the -950 penalty. Frequently the sites are completely white hat, organic and 10+ Years old and been hit some for over a year Go figure. http://www.google.com/search?comple...terWorld.com+++950+penalty&btnG=Google+Search
This is really tough. The domain alone cost me over $4,000. Not to mention the $xx,xxx I have spent on content, design, links, directories, etc... I hope there is some way that i can either get rid on the -950 penalty or that it will just go away eventually.
The same thing happened with one of my websites over a year ago. Traffic dropped to ZERO overnight. I didn't do any change onpage besides adding new content. I didn't do any off site SEO either. Traffic then slowly was rising up and only now in the last two months has it been on a satisfactory level, although still not the same as it was before, even though the website has 2x as much content as it had last year. Google lottery.
That's why I use YouTube for my main traffic and not Google - a lot more stable (though also in most cases a lot less traffic)
I'm experiencing a similar thing right now. Three days ago my google traffic disappeared completely. It is still indexed and in the cache, and there was no message at google tools. I can only hope that it returns to its proper place. I have done nothing fishy at all with the site. It is certainly not a nice feeling.
Google seems to be handing out a lot of these -950 penaties at the moment. One of my sites got hit by one a couple of weeks ago. I don't do any black hat stuff at all. It's just so annoying that google has a virtual monopoly on search (above 80% of all searches). I think we as webmasters could educate people away from using google and encourage the use of other search engines. If other engines were more popular, at least if google hit us with a stupid penalty it wouldn't have such drastic effect on traffic. I've heard of people having to fire many employees when these google penaties have struck, which is terrible, particularly in today's economic climate.
Seems that it is your bad luck,try contacting google via webmaster and check whether your competitor has done something wrong to take your site down.....
I would say most probably one or more of most important backlinks got dropped. Maybe you bought more backlinks from same guy and he removed them for some resons? I think that happned to me a month back, I dropped off the face of google for many great keywords. Traffic was -50%. I started building links again and today as a christmas present I got back up to almost where I were a month back or it could be google just manually adjusting algorithm for your keywords. Did your competitor sites drop as well? Do you see any new sites that weren't there before?
Thats the thing. My competitors did not really move at all. I would be fine with them devaluing my links, because that would mean I could still build and rank the site. I am more worried about a -950 penalty, which means they would have to remove that manually.