About a month and a half ago my site got hit by Google, I dropped 6 places for my primary KW and out of the first 100 results for most of my secondary terms and inner pages. For some reason my homepage still ranks on the #1 spot under local pages search for many terms where for which I'm not in the first 100 in the web search. I haven't violated the guidelines or practice any aggressive link campaigns and kept uploading fresh new pages to the site. The site in question is a subdomain of a stronger site I have which links to him and targets a different country (although it also ranks in that same specific local search engine) Have anyone came across a similar punishment or have any suggestion on how I should approach this?
There could be a variety of reasons for this, Google algorithm changes, etc. If you've done everything right for your site, then the most likely reason could be that some better sites may have appered in the rankings which simply drove your site lower down the rankings. Make sure the the subdomain site has different content than the other site you mentioned. If you're just showing the same content in a different language, then Google may have made improvements to their translation algorithms, which resulted in your site being penalized for duplicate content. It might be worth your while in setting the subdomain site up on a proper domain. As long as you 301 redirect all the pages to the corresponding pages on the domain site, you should be able to keep all the linkjuice and backlinks. Not a minor job, though, so you'd probably want to think carefully about it.
Have you checked if your site was hacked with some bad content posted elsewhere on the subdomain? That's a pretty common cause of penalties.
yes it happened to me too. I have been sandboxed for 2 times now. And will get out of it in few days again. I got sandboxed on 31st march. My pr is same. I will post a thread if i manage to escape from Sandbox this time.
2 of my sites are also sandboxed 2 times till now ... but this time its taking long time to come out of penalization just trying to build quality links and updating site with more stuff, hope to get into rankings soon
The troubling thing is that apart for the -6 penalty for my primary terms all the long tail KW and inner pages were kicked out entirely which smells like a punishment. The site content is unique and I haven't seen any crawling problems in Google webmaster tools. Do you think the problem may be over optimization of inner links? There are quite a few links to the main domain and just a week before the drops I added the link back from the main domain. The site content is unique and it hasn't been subjected to any malicious attack, unless you count the nasty kick Google gave me...
Im sorry to hear your stories, I am also sad now that my authority keywords are nowhere to be found. I hope things will be back to normal again soon.