My main keyword rankings are gone!

[zorogat]

Hello, i waited 10 days and now i'm officially panicking.
my 1 year old site about learning languages with 300 pages of original content (adding one new page every day) has lost all of its positions in the serps for the main keywords: traffic has gone from 2000 to 200 UV a day.
it happened march the 14th. in the last months the only thing i did to the site is adding good original content.
morevoer in the last 4 months no promotion was done at all.

site has a lot of good natural backlinks, and a lot of pages have pr 4 or pr 3.
all last year the traffic has been slowly increasing, from 20 UV a day to 2000, and now all of a sudden this incredible relegation.

i wish i knew how this is possible, didn't get any warning on google webmaster tools.
anyone experienced anything similar?
how to discover if my site is penalized and why?

[johnnie]

Maybe you were hacked?

[zorogat]

Thanks for replying Johnnie
i don't think my site was hacked i checked all the files in the server via ftp and they are all the original ones... (forgot to say this is a wordpress based site)

[tedster]

Unfortunately, today's hacks - especially Wordpress hacks, by the way - can be quite difficult to detect. See [webmasterworld.com...] for the details.

[johnnie]

Try [google.com...] to see if your site was used to serve malware. Also try visiting your site with a spoofed googlebot user agent and see if anything unusual turn up.

[zorogat]

Hello Tedster and Johnnie
thank you very much for the hint.
what's weird is that the Xenu LinkSleuth can't access my website.. when i try to check for the links it says: forbidden request.

this doesn't happen with any other of my websites...
wordpress is 2.5.1 version...
there's something really fishy in there.. i am definitively investigatin the issue, maybe it's nothing but the fact that the LinkSleuth can't access the links is really weird...

[MrWumpus]

Check your HTTP response headers. I had a PHP scripting error in my index page that generated a 500 forbidden error from my web host but allowed browsers and users to continue viewing the page. However, Google bot stopped on that error. I didn't think to check the headers until I noticed Google Webmaster Tools telling me it could not access the site. On a whim I checked the headers, saw the error, and very quickly fixed the script

[dstiles]

Talk to your hosting company. They may have a block on link checkers such as xenu - if they're really good they'll block lots of real nasties as well. :)

[zorogat]

still no luck....
i checked with [google.com...]
and everything is fine, on threat detected

then i checked http response headers, and got 200 ok from all main pages

then i changed my user agent to google bot and still had an ok response (200) from pages

one thing that i didn't mention, but had no influence whatsoever in the last year is that i have translated some articles and published the original too, side by side with my translation... the original of course i took from other websites, but always including a link to the real article.
this is a language learning website and translating articles is a good exercise.
could this be the issue? and why only now?

[zorogat]

Pheeeeewwwww...after 12 days things have gone back to (almost) normal, again, out of the blue Google switched on all of my main keywords.
Traffic is at 90% what it used to be.

I haven't changed anything on the site, except i added some new content.
I don't know what was that, but it was scary... made me realize how much my site is really in the hands of google, and i am not sure i like that.

[jackyork]

It's sort of rotation. I met the problem too.