Google SEVERE drop as of last week (oct 10) on long standing .org site

[TBKO]

Hello Experts

Wanted some imput if possible.

I own a .org informational site that has been #1 in its category for Google Yahoo and Bing under a major keyword for years.  The site is aged back to 2005 and all of the sudden it dropped on August 10 (Google only- Yahoo and Bing still #1)) but remained atop the primary keywords that it is namesaked for .org (xxxxyyyzzz.org) and then Oct 9-10 it dropped from the page 1 top ranking it had for years on that primary keyword to page 13.  I dont know where to begin to look.  Any ideas how something like this could happen and what "Stones" I should turn.

We purchased the website and are not SEO gurus so just not sure.  Any help would be appreciated

[TBKO]

ALMOST FORGOT.  We already wrote google webmaster for reinclusion thinking it was somehow banned and they wrote back there were NO webspam issues that were affecting it.  Whatever that means

[David_ODonnell]

The reply your received via webmaster tools would have been regarding manual penalties, that does not mean you have not been affected by an algorithm change.

Without being able to review your website, basically you want to start by looking into issues such as the quality / uniqueness of your content, as well as the quality of your link profile http://www.opensiteexplorer.org.

[danatanseo]

Hi tagbiomed,

I want to help, but I first want to clarify something. In your post, you said  "it dropped from the page 1 top ranking it had for years on that primary keyword to page 13."

Did you mean that your page dropped from #1 to #13 spots in the SERPS, or from page 1 to page 13 in the SERPs? There's a big difference between those two things and I just wanted to clarify.

Thanks!

Dana

[TBKO]

Top page 1 to mid page 13. (About 130 spots)

[Tosten]

Were you ever able to recover your web rankings? I have the same issue on one of our client's sites and it is driving me crazy. Our site is a WordPress site. Was yours by chance? Wonder if some plugin caused it somehow...

Thanks!

[danatanseo]

Hi again. I am just touching base to see what the current status is of this ranking drop. Did it recover? If not, I am curious to know if you moved the site to a new IP address when you purchased it? If so, was the new IP located in the same country as where it was originally, or was it different? It could be that you did none of the above. I'm just trying to see if we can rule this out as a potential cause for the drop.