I have a site that is just now about 3 months old (domain is 9 months old). Organic traffic has been slowly but steadily increasing. I was at about 30+ uniques per day from Google. Nothing too exciting, but at least I knew I was making progress. That was until a few days ago. ALL of my keywords dropped from page one of Google to page four+. Some keywords were dropped completely. However, I know it's not a ban... because my site still shows in their index. And some of my keywords still show, even though they aren't on page one any longer. So now I'm trying to figure out what the hell happened. Coincidentally (or not?), the day this happened was the day I made quite a few changes. Do any of these stick out to any of you as the possible cause for my drop? 1. Changed my category base in WordPress from the default "category" to a more keyword friendly "men". I did not however do any sort of redirect from the old category urls at first. My thoughts were that since my site was so new, and I probably didn't have any links leading directly to the category pages... that it didn't matter. But now I went back through and did redirects from the old category pages. 2. I did a bit of anchor text and backlink analysis on my site using Market Samurai. 3. I linked to my site from the Digital Point forums using anchor text. Come to find out, supposedly these forums are considered a bad neighborhood. So I went back through and deleted my link later. 4. I use WordPress to run my site, so all images automatically get a title, but no alt attribute. So I went through all 200+ images and added the alt and title. I basically just took the title of the article and added it to both the title and the alt. Since the articles are short product reviews, the title of the article actually is the image being shown. So for example, in an article titled "Cool Ferrari Car" originally the title tag was something like cool-ferrari-car. But then I changed both the title and the alt to Cool Ferrari Car. One concern I have is that my articles are very short (between 100 and 250 words). The site is very similar to uncrate.com. So I'm wondering if it's possible that Google thinks I'm trying to keyword stuff now? Because the same title appears in the title of the article, the title of the image, and the alt of the image. So the day after this happened, I deleted the DP backlink, and I also did redirects on the category pages. This was a couple days ago. Still haven't got my rankings back. Any suggestions on what went wrong exactly? and how I can fix it?
Whenever there is fall in the rankings, the first thing is to do is RELAX. It might be a temporary thing. Wait for the site to get back in rankings and subsequently continue the regular work on the site. When you're sure that there is a penalty, then try and analyse the reason for the penalty. Do not do anything silly until you have figured out the reason for getting penalised. After you have figured out the reason, start mending things and you'll get back in rankings.
Whatever you did, nothing was wrong. I'd say wait, don't panic and continue to build links slowly and steadily. Your ranking in the serps will eventually rise. And yeah, Dp forums aren't considered a bad neighborhood. Getting a link from a bad neighborhood isn't harmful but linking to a bad neighborhood can get you in trouble.