One morning I woke to find, traffic to one of my site had gone down drastically. It had fallen down by around 60% - 70%. The first thing I did was run to some of the popular forums to see if this was a problem across the board, or if it was only for a 'selected few'. My other sites were getting almost the similar amount of traffic if not more, so this had to be something to do with this particular site, unless my traffic tracking sources were wrong. But, that din seem to be the problem. I took some time, spoke to a few friends I knew. I did not have a lot of out going links from my site, especially the blogroll... only a few here and there, a couple of them to my other sites and a few were pointing to sites in the same niche (highly relevant). As far as I knew, I had not done anything wrong, the number of pages indexed in the SE had not reduced, nothing seemed to have changed. Still no traffic! The only way I could hope the traffic would restore was by mailing Google in person and asking them what was the problem. I used the reconsideration request form in Google Webmaster Central and raised a request. The first two days, there was no increase in traffic. I was, very vigilantly watching all the visitors who were coming to the site, slowly the traffic started picking on the third day. Seemed like, the request had worked and my explanation was considered and they had put me back on the roll. This is when something interesting caught me, I saw a couple of visits from Googles' home center to a couple of 'specific posts'. All the posts had something in common: 1> They had links to casino, poker, pay day loan, credit card, similar related sites! 2> All these topics are highly un-related to the site currently being penalized, 3> All the posts were screaming buy or best service, without back ground check. I immediately realized, that I was being penalized coz of such links. But wait, I never wrote any off-topic reviews, and a big No-No to casino/poker/similar sites. This had to the previous OWNER, from whom I bought the site and it is now biting me . Well My mistake that I was not careful when picking up the site, I can blame no one now. I opened an other reconsideration request stating the facts. The traffic has gone down again. I just hope somebody from G will consider the actual facts . All I can do, is wait for G to consider my site again . /G Note: Any one whose buying a site from others, remember to do a thorough check before picking up one. I bought this site a lil over 15 months ago, and put in effort to build this one, only to figure that it gets penalized coz of someone elses mistake.