The way you did submission is wrong, you should go for ethical and continous link building rather than submittiing your website in thousands of directories. You should alternatively change Title and Meta Desc. for submissions.
Google will jump your rankings around if you have gained to many links, too quick. Should keep them natural, growing over a period of time. All in all, too many directory submissions are bad. J
I agree with people here in the thread that the repetition of same anchor text may have resulted this...
You are defenitely in trouble if you ordered 1000 submissions by someone who you don't really trust. There are MANNNYY so-called directory submission services out there that charge you $10 or $20 for 1000 submissions. What they do is that they run a network of hundreds of directories, mostly hosted on the same IP. Most of the domains are .info and that reflects the credibility of these web directories. Directory submissions do not get you penalized you need not to worry about that BUT, if you get 1000 submissions spread across in limited ips then you are defenitely trying to wake the monster from its sleep here. Also, someone here mentioned that the anchor text could have been the issue and I completely agree. If you are planning to submit to 1000 directories, you need to make sure that you have at least 10 different anchors. The MORE, the better! Not just the anchor text but also the description should vary as well. You should wait out and stop submitting to directories any further. It would help us even more if you tell us where you ordered the service or if you could share the report that you got after ordering the directory submission service.
Having a mixture of descriptions and title tags make the spiders go bananas. Hence, the bouncing around.
I would definitely agree with this. I think the timing is a coincidence. Just because you saw results fall within days of the directory submission does not mean the submission caused it. There is no proof of this. It's like saying "some kid listened to Judas Priest and then killed himself the next day, so it must be the music that did it." That's speculation, there's no proof and there are many many factors that need to be looked at before you come to a conclusion. I find it hard to believe the Big G would slap you down within a mere 5 days of you doing a submission. I just don't believe that it watches every site in the world that closely and can deliver "punishment" that quickly. No easy answer for this but just keep an eye on things. People see wild fluctuations in rankings sometimes. I've seen clients sits drop from the first page to the forth page and back to the first page within two weeks time. I can't explain it, but it happens. If you have a good quality site, I wouldn't worry about it. If you have a weak site that you've been buying links and directory submissions for because the content is so poor it's the only way you can get rankings, then you could be in trouble.
Thank you very much for all the advice and useful information. Perhaps, I can tell you more about my site: 1. my site is listed in Yahoo and DMOZ directories; PR4 2. I had provided 20 sets of title/desc for a 1000 dir submission. Is 50:1 ratio alright? Any possibilities my site was submitted to a spam site or bad neighbourhood which caused the problem. 3. Most of the keywords used to be in 1st / 2nd pages are now in 3rd / 4th pages. Sounds like G -30 penalty. Do you agree? I did SITE: command and all pages are still indexed. Any suggestion on how I can recover this and get my ranking back?