hi , I learned lots of thing here on DP and I am sure there are tons of things that I still need to learn to make this blogging job work . I always come here to check the treats and learn something ,but right now I have a problem that I cant solve it myself so I think that maybe you guys can show me a way to fix it . I am going to describe the whole story that happened to my blog . First of all I am sorry if my English is not so well .(working on it) December was a very good month for my blog . I had a good search engine traffic , something near 17000 but in the last days of month (28th) my traffic from google started to drop off and traffic died on 30th december . I read an article here that some guys were discussing about the same problem in search engine traffic in the last days of December. so I believed that the problem will be solve in a few days after holydays. but unfortunately I was totally wrong and since then I have a very small amount of traffic from google something like 12 per day . so in the last few days I was thinking about what else may happened to my blog ! and I wondered maybe this problems occur cause I changed my blog theme ! Actually I changed the theme since 31 december and I didn’t realized this as a problem till January 7 because until this time I thought "the problem began on 28 december and the theme was changed in 31 december so thats not the problem" . how idiot was I , so I got into the webmaster tools and saw the terrible mistake that I made . I was running my previous theme on a later version of wordpress , and wordpress didn’t support the Tags by itself in that time , so I used a plugin to have the tag system working on my blog , but when I decided to change my blog theme I also decided to upgrade my wordpress from the older version to the latest version . and then I realized that wordpress made a built in tag system for itself . then after 2 days working on that stupid built in tag system I decided not to use it so I got back to my plugin and grab the latest version of it and activate it on my blog . but there was a big problem in the latest wordpress , which was the "tag" word . now the "tag" is a reserved word for wordpress and only work with it's own tag system so my plugin cant use this word anymore , and here is the most stupid work that I did , I changed the "tag" to "tags" to make the plugin working again and I told myself that search engine will be index the "tags" as my default tag query very soon . but I was totally wrong and search engine didn’t do this for the blog and all my tags are still indexed with "tag" in google for example : http://www.something.com/tag/someTerm supposed to be http://www.something.com/tags/someTerm and when I understand this as a problem in January 7 I had something near 1400 pages with error 404 listed in my webmaster tools stat . since then I find a plugin to redirect all tag to tags and make the site working again without any error 404 , but noting good happened to the traffic and it was still 12 - 20 a day . I was also made something new to the new theme which was a list of the latest 10 posts of my other 2 blog via rss showing on the footer . then I saw another article here on DP which said that you shouldn’t use your other sites links which are on the same ip . so I also fixed (removed) that too and believe me there is no other major change to the theme except the design . I fix the whole errors in 2 days after January 7 and still no good news from google . and I wait for the results 3 more days but still nothing then it was the first time in my blogging lifetime that I heard of something called google give you a penalty !! So what ? I run a blog for 14 month do a good job , update it always and be patient about the whole traffic things to grow slowly and now google give me a penalty !! sounds like its ture and happend to me . I found an article about how to handle the penalty : http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-handle-a-google-penalty-and-an-example-from-the-field-of-real-estate in this article there is picture of a chart with some questions . I passed the first two question with the "yes" answer and I had a pause on the third question which was : " When you search for 5 - 6 relatively unique terms in the title tag of your pages , does your site still rank in the top 10-20 results ? " My answer to this question is "I am not sure" because in the webmaster tools when I was checking on the top search queries there were some queries in the past 2 weeks which my blog was in the 10-20 first result but when I clicked on that queries to confirm if its true or not I am facing with a big "No" answer, except one query which I had lots of traffic from that when my blog was working fine and surely I had lots of backlinks to that post . but I think thats the only post on the 10-20 results NOT 5 - 6 . So I think maybe my answer to to the last question is No so the reply to the "No" answer was : "You have most likely had many of your links wiped of their value . Google's spam team IDs and eliminates the link love passing ability of many sites & networks every day , so you are not alone . go to webmaster centeral , verify , submit a re-inclusion request saying you're sorry , ID'ing your bad links and asking forgiveness. Then , go get lots of great , High Quality , natural links to help you rank again . " I have a couple of questions , do you guys confirm what they said ? Do I have to go and say hi please forgive me because something wired happened to my site suddenly and you kicked my blog out of search engine??? you know there are lots of thing happening together at the same time , first the drop off in the traffic on the last days of december which I dont know if it is natural or not ? second the whole 404 errors and third the link exchange problem ! actually I had some link exchange things since 6 month ago and after that I never do that again and all of my backlinks are coming from the people whom linked to my posts . the whole blogs that I made a link exchange with , are good blogs and I dont think that they are kind of spams or bad links ! which one of these cause this problem ? as a matter of fact I dont know exactly what to ask you guys . I just tell the whole story , now what do you think about it ? I know its a very long post that I made , I am so sorry . hope I didnt waste your time . Thank you for your attention .