Google rankings drop for several of my keywords

[m2ksolutions]

On the 15th there was an almost overnight/sudden drop in my sites rankings for many keywords that were ranked in the top results of page 1 for over a year. They are now nowhere to be found in Google. I had made no real change to my website or pages either.Its a completely legit business website. I'm just can't figure out why i dropped so much.

Webmaster tools shows no messages either to indicate if something was wrong or if I should change something.

What should I do at this point? Is there a way to figure out what might have contributed to the drop?

[Sand]

It's very hard to say, but in my experience, a simultaneous drop in rankings for many or all keywords is most likely attributable to Panda or Penguin (since they are site-wide filters). You won't receive a Webmaster Tools notification if your site has been impacted by those.

It's also possible they just made another unannounced algorithmic change (of which there are MANY in any given month), and that you've been caught up in one of those. However, when something like that happens, I usually only see it impact *some* of the search queries that send traffic to a site, rather than all of them at once.

[m2ksolutions]

has anyone recovered from Panda or Penguin?

[Sand]

I've recovered from Panda, and know a lot of other people have as well.

I don't have any experience with Penguin, so I'll have to let other people chime in there. Anecdotally, it *seems* harder to recover from.

This is why:

The keys to getting out of Panda are all on your site, so you have full control over it.

The keys to getting out of Penguin are on other people's sites, so you're at the mercy of other people to a certain degree.