My site has different sections. We are maintaining sections by creating directories on root level. come to the point, few of my sections was ranking good before few month. They fall down in SERP. I dont know suddenly what happen to those section. e.g. http://www.mysite.com/section/ this is the section previously was having good positions in SERP. Strange thing is that pages of this section i.e. http://www.mysite.com/section/page.php are having good positions. They are doing well. For all most all keywords they are in first 5 in Google. But remaining 4 pages are not there. One thing i measure that the section /section/ as well as the remaining 4 pages are not papering for its title search in Google in exact search and they are not also appearing for Content exact search. I have total 7 sections for this site. I have same problem with other two section. If i want to file a reconsideration request for a particular section i.e http://www.mysite.com/section/ then should I file reconsideration? Give me your expert opinion.
I had a similar problem on my website(s). the traffic on my first site fall down by 70% on Nov 5th and then week after second site experience same level of degradation. The traffic decrease resulted due to my position in SERP (move too far from first page). The good news that my fist site now getting back to first position in SERP as t was before. The second website still not, but I'm optimistic and hope it will come back in week or two. May be same happening to you, unless your competitors outperformed you in SEO.