Google Caffeine and new penalty?

[kgibbo]

Hello, I'm new on this forum … I hope guy you could help me to understand what is going on my website.

SITUATION:
Before 7th December 2009 my website was ranking in the first page of Google.it and Google.com for keywords (two terms) for my niche, traffic from search engine was quite high.
Suddenly after that day my website has completely drop down to position 50-60 with huge consequences in traffic (from 900 visit per day to 60).

Here some data about the situation before that day and after:

PAST SITUATION - (Good situation)
Page indexed on Google.com:
6880
Page indexed on Google.it:
6880
Links counted with Google WebMaster:
8324
Page Rank for Index:
4
Position target keywords two terms:
3

NEW SITUATION - (Bad situation)
Page indexed on Google.com:
3400
Page indexed on Google.it:
15400
Links counted with Google WebMaster:
9520
Page Rank for Index:
4
Position target keywords two terms:
58

NOTE:
We recently use some service from some seo company.
I am not sure which technic they had used but I suppose some sort of BLOG Commenting and link directory.

OBSERVATION:
As you can see there is a HUGE difference of number of pages indexed by Google.it and Google.com Version, PR has kept high for most of page without any difference (just 1-2 pages had decrease PR of 1 point).
I also notice a strange behaviors in my Google WebMaster account:
Statistics for TOP SEARCH queries for all December where not corresponding at TRUE with the result in Serp.
I have not receive any warning message from Google for any penalty and so on.
For all December I have notice a drastic change in Serp result for my niche generally, some website with lower PR now appear first page, there was also a page 404 at top 10 result! Now this sort of errors has been removed but page with low PR that mine are top on result.

- What do you think about this situation?
- Could be some sort of penalty? How to get ride off it?

Any idea would be really appreciate.
Thanks once again for your time.
Regards

[ogletree]

Where did all the new pages come from. Do you really have that many pages? Were those pages there before the jump to 15400?

[lpiracing]

Any idea what sort of pages dropped from Google.com?

Any issues with Duplicate Content on the pages?

Are the pages static or dynamic? Any URL rewriting?

[dailypress]

My pages dropped from Google just yesterday! I was getting on average > 200 visitors/day from Google and then today I noticed Google analytics says 80/day.

I did a search on my main keywords and almost all went from top page 1 to page 2... !

[benallos]

My concern right now is that my index.htm is nowhere to b found in Google. It is not even listed and i don't know why. I just discovered it last 2 days ago when I try to check a competitive keyphrase if my site is still in the top but on the 16th page. And when I check again, my index.htm is not listed or indexed in google. But some of my pages are not affected only the index page.

Is this good or bad?

[kgibbo]

Thanks guys for your reply.
To ogletree:
- 15400 Pages existed in my website, mainly from blog and forum.

To lpiracing:
- page dropped for google where static page, i suppose with more backlink from commenting in blog and some link directory

- no any issue with duplicate content

- page are static, no URL rewriting?

If you allow me i can send you my url in a private message

Any idea what could be? maybe some penalty?
thanks once again

[walkman]

We recently use some service from some seo company. I am not sure which technic they had used but I suppose some sort of BLOG Commenting and link directory.

You need to find out how much of this they did. Google will penalize you for such things if done excessively especially if you used those two terms over and over.

Never use SEOs you find on DP and other forums, they will hurt you

[kgibbo]

Thanks walkman,
in case of penalty:
- how long could take for penalty to expire?
- can i do anything to improve this situation or i can consider my website from google prospect completely lost forever?
thanks for your time

[walkman]

kgibbo,
that's tough to say. If it's a manual penalty it can be years. Removing blog comments is near impossible so you are in a tough situation, you can't even submit a re-inclusion unless they are gone.

[kgibbo]

ok i understand but if would be a MANUAL PENALTY
Google should tell me at least in message section of Google webmaster... or not?
thanks for your help

[kgibbo]

also i have read that MANUAL penalty do apply to all the ranking of website, in my case PR is still high on almost all pages and pages are still in serp.
thanks once again

[walkman]

kgibbo,
you MAY be pushed back 50 places in the serps. For example, if you were #1, now you are 51.

Google does not tell you of the penalty in most cases.

[RedCardinal]

If you're using the site: operator to get pages indexed then I think you'll be wasting your time - it's the new link: operator. Completely borked now.

[kgibbo]

walkman,
ok i understand in fact it happened this now im around 50 in position.

[rj87uk]

RedCardinal are you saying that the Site: operator is not working any more or is the data off?

[kgibbo]

site: operator seems working for me, it is also used in google toolbar using SEARCH ONLY IN THIS WEBSITE

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 3:55 am (utc) on Jan. 8, 2010]
[edit reason] fixed formatting [/edit]

[RedCardinal]

Figures returned ("Results 1-10 of x") are garbage these days. Since Google moved to new infrastructure it seems that they no longer give accurate figures via site:

site: also does quite a bit of processing to adjust the result for dupes and canonicals etc.

If you really want to know what's indexed the most accurate figure Google gives now is pages indexed from submitted sitemaps. That throws up all sorts of other issues though...

[borsoal]

I am finding that "caffeine" or whatever is being put into effect, I work at a PR 8 website and some of our top pages are missing from the index, or are fluctuating dramatically, out of the blue. Anyone else seeing anything like this?