Google's new penalty type or bug ?

Info:

- website 1 year old
- in the last PR update gained PR5 from PR4 (about 1 month ago)
- hundreds of back links Google registered in the Googlebar and thousands of links in GWT
- rich and useful content, reviews, maps etc...
- affiliate links
- over 5 thousand pages
- all content unique
- no RSS etc...
- no spamming, no link buying, no comment spamming, no email sending, only natural links and few link exchanges - all of them good neighbors and theme sites
- own fast server, own IP just for this website


about 3 weeks ago - drop from SERPs from #1-25 to #300-500, some keywords got lost totally, Google traffic almost ZERO (about 90-95% G traffic drop) - THIS LAST FOR ABOUT 24 HOURS

then the website came back to its original position and G traffic, after 7 days again the same drop in G traffic for about 3-4 hours and again, G traffic got back.
After another 7 days again G traffic drop to 5% of its original state and it lasts for about 10 days till now.

interesting:
- PR keeps the same - PR5 - some subpages even gained higher pagerank few days ago
- number of links registered by Googlebar got higher in last 4-5 days
- all the pages are in the G index, but for the keyword they were in top #1-30, they are now #150-700
- LONG TALEs 99% LOST, NO LONG TALEs IN G SERPs, just few short keywords/day now
- if I put the website name with spaces to G search (e.g. blue widgets tool), then we are #1 in SERPs
- if I copy and past some UNIQUE text (e.g. 15 words sentence - original text) from homepage into G search, then we are not in the TOP100 in SERPs. If I put this sentence into quotes "", then it is #1
- G cache shows actual page, indexed few days ago, so G indexes our pages and updates its cache results
- GWT shows lower number of pages visited daily - drop about 50%


it looks as some kind of penalty, but I think, if it is penalty, then PR, number of links and G indexing would go down, but it's not happening - even opposite - more links and higher PR...

some G bug?
anybody experienced such Google behavior? any advice what it can mean?

 

Was your website down for few days ? I did get something similar when one of my websites was down for 3 days because of server issue. The traffic went down and from google. But thhing were back to normal in 3 weeks.

 

Hi!

no, the site was not down - we have outage checking service, which checks every 10 minutes, if the website is online and we did not experienced any outages for at least 5-6 months

 

Sorry for general words, but it can be anything. Watch it a couple of days. If nothing changes, then active actions to be done.