Greetings, Last night, I noticed that nearly every site in my webmaster tools account was hit with a severe penalty. At first, I thought maybe it was a manual review because I've been working on a very large new site (9 months old) that is quickly growing, but has always had very little traffic from Google. I've manually built links for this site by contacting other websites and asking them to link to my site if they thought it was cool (editorial discretion links). I might get 1-4 links per week out of the 100 or so people I contact, all really good links from resource sites, news sites and association clubs, etc... Well, I thought maybe my site was getting a manual review to be finally be lifted out of the sandbox because of all the high quality links and activity on the site, but then realized it was no longer ranking for it's brand name. Many other sites are not ranking for their brand names anymore either. Although they do rank #1 for [mybrand.com]. Luckily, my new site was already receiving 80% of it's traffic (100 visitors/day) from direct links and return visitors, barely had anything coming in from Google to begin with... It sucks even more since the most popular referring keyword in Google was our brand name in #1 position and now people can't even find our brand name in Google except on position #20. It's not even a competitive "keyword" brand name, it's a unique word that I invented. The odd part is, I haven't cross-linked any sites except one niche site with a single sitewide, highly relevant NOFOLLOW ad link at the top of the page which drives relevant traffic to my new general non-niche site, which is very similar. My new site is constantly changing with new content being added each day. A personal site of mine that is completely independent from my online business for years was hit with the same similar penalty. I haven't done any changes to the site in years. In addition, I have a group of gambling sites that got hit as well. None of them are cross-linked and I've just let them sit for years without changing anything and suddenly they get hit. For months, I've been trying to get my new site up and out of the Google sandbox, building total whitehat links, never bought a single link either, the site is popular among visitors we do get and we've gotten a lot of return visitors. The only major change we've done was with canonical urls with that site. Still, it's odd that all of my other sites got hit with a similar penalty, even ones totally unrelated and independent of each other... It seems that the common denominator was that all of these sites are verified in my webmaster tools account. So, has anyone else ever dealt with this or heard about this before?
Looking into it more, I noticed that a Google Inc. Mountain View IP visited all of my affected sites at the same exact time (give or take a few seconds). Anyone know what this might mean? I'm really hoping this is just a manual routine review rather than a penalty. My sites are still indexed, but they've had a massive drop in rankings. Is it common for Google to knock all of the sites down for a day or so to do a manual review? Many of these sites are completely unrelated to each other and haven't been messed around with in well over a year.
Many webmasters who obtained unnatural links received this message in GWT. Shortly after they received a rankings drop.
Luckily, I haven't gotten one of these warnings in GWT so far. I'm not sure if I have to worry about that either since I haven't built barely any links. I noticed in my web stats about 5 new (and good) backlinks in the last 2 weeks from people's hobby sites or clubs and association sites.