I know this has been a topic before but I wanted to explain my situation. I have a site that is very old online and has always done well with google and has hundreds of backlinks. Years down the road I created a new site that is very similar in topic and slightly similar in style. Over a year or two of the new site being online many 70% of the same backlink sites now linking to this new site as well. The old site has a sudden 60% drop in google traffic in July 2007 followed by the new site having a sudden 60% increase in google traffic one month later. The traffic stays steady for a year with the new site being up and the older site being down. On July of 2008 the new site drops in google also and to this day it still hasn't returned. Both of these sites are on the same server but have different class c IP's. They are also not crosslinked.
Could this type of setup have been seen as spammy and causing a penalty or filter from google?
