My site traffic dropped 90% overnight. Google dance or penalty?

I'm really worried, my site traffic dropped 90% on May 14. It went from an average of 700 to 15 visits per day. Has this ever happened to any of you? For how long should I wait before reviewing my content? My domain is 1 1/2 years old, but I started blogging frequently on november 2008. Since then I never had such a dramatic traffic drop, I search for my site name on G and it still appears.
My site is:
http://pharmamotion.com.ar

 

With that big a drop you may have been penalized. Try searching Google through a proxy or at least when not logged into a Google account. You may have lost rankings on other Google data centers. I think Google watches certain niches a little closer. Have a good look at your site and decide if its content is appropriate for everyone and if it is spammy in any way.

 

I still can find my site name on google, all my pages are still indexed so it's not a matter of indexing. Could it raise to normal in these days ? On may 3 I changed the theme, could it be something related to it?

 

BTW thank you vansterdam

 

Yes it appears that you are indexed and ranking here as well. Do you have Google Analytics or another stats program installed? You should dig deeper into your stats to see where the drop in traffic is happening. You may find it is just from one or two major keywords or from other websites.

 

Thank you, as you can see in the pic, my site does not have any major keywords that drive most of the traffic. Do you think it's a too big drop to be a "Google dance"?

 

most likely your not looking at your analytics that well and that you have got penalized/sandboxed for a specific keyword that you may have built anchor text/blog comments too fast and too soon. This happens to many people who attempt to buy too many high PR backlinks.

 

I have never bought links, what happpened in the last month is that I hosted a blog carnival. That brought me links from 4 or 5 blogs (reciprocal and of more than 4 in PR), and one one way link from a blog's blogroll with PR 6.

 

If you were sandboxed, typing in the same of your blog wouldn't even show in search results most likely. I would say you might have just posted something that tripped the Google spam filters considering it isn't that old of a site. The topics you discuss are often filled with spam, so a search engine can't always tell the difference.

I wish I had more specific advice, I would just dig through what you have done recently to see what might have had a big impact.

 

Just give it some time and see what happens. Sometimes a site might disappear from top rankings only come to back after a week or two.

 

Thanks Gallito. I just linked between some posts in the same blog. Being optimistic, do you think after this drop there could be a raise?. I ask you this because 300 of my incoming links appeared in the last month, to be more specific after a blog carnival dated april 14.

 

I never heard of "benign" desappearances that take that long. Do you know of anyone in that situation?

 

Check all of the keywords sending you traffic before and after the 14th. Then check rankings for keywords that are missing. You should find some keywords are no longer sending traffic.

 

The key is to look at your keyword that was bringing in all that traffic. And you can be sandboxed for 1 specific keyword even though others show results. Find out what keyword it was most likely you had just 1 good keyword keyword and something happened to that page.

 

Thank you all for your thoughts, right now I'm analizing things before and after May 14

 

Conclusions from the analysis:
-Traffic from Google on May 13: 505
-Traffic from Google on May 14: 97
The total number of keywords that drove traffic on the two days is 569.
This means that my site lost ranking in many keywords, not just in a couple. The problem is getting worse since visits from G continue dropping. Frankly, I don't know whether I should wait or if I should start changing things in my blog content.

 

UPDATE; I found out that my Mimbo wordpress theme could be the problem. On every single post it generates a link to the author page, which can cause duplicate content. I just changed it, let's see what happens.

 

did you involve in aggressive link building suddenly ?

 

I would say I did, I got 4 or 5 blogroll reciprocal link exchanges and one one way link from a PR 6 blogroll.
All this in the last month.
The thing now is: Will google penalize me or something like that?

 

Hi, did your google pagerank changed ?

Also, you can analyze which kind of traffic is most reduced (direct, by refferers or by search engines), that could hive you idea for the real problem reason. I hope it could help, good luck