I own 3 separate businesses that all use the same physical address. It's a legit brick & mortor office. The 3 businesses are in completely separate fields. Different phone numbers.
Biz 1 has been around for 10 years. Its web site ranks #1 position for main keyword for at least that long.
The other 2 businesses are fairly new. I put up new web sites for them, Biz 2 on the same hosting account as Biz 1 and Biz 3 on a completely separate hosting account/company.
I put up web sites for biz 2 & 3 that have the same physical address, but different phone numbers. On my Biz 1 web site I put links to sites 2 & 3. Also I added sites 2 & 3 on my google console.
For the past 6 months the sites for biz 2 & 3 worked their way up and started ranking on page 1 for their main keywords. Things looked like they were going good. Then on Sept 23 something happened and boom, the site for biz 2 dropped from #9 position then one day later to #35 position. The site for biz 3 dropped from position #5 to #10 then $15 a day later. My biggest concern is that the site for Biz 1 which was in #1 position dropped to #2 then a week later to #3.
I have removed the links from site 1 to 2 & 3 and removed site 2 & 3 from my google console account.
Are such drops indicative of a algo penalty? I checked and its not manual. I'm thinking Google may see the sites are spam or related. Or would an algo penalty be more severe, such as a 50-100 placement drop?
All this started Sept 23.
Should I also completely delete the domains for the sites 2 & 3 in hopes site 1 doesn't get penalized?
