Have I been penalised?

[SamCUK]

I recently set up a site (3 months ago). After a couple of months I was on page 1/2/3 for all my main keywords. However on friday all the keywords except for 3 dropped out of the SERPS. Today only 1 keyword remains in the SERPS!

I'm an amatuer SEO and remember with my 1st site I worked on (this new one is only my second) that it occassionally dissapeared from the SERPS for a few days and came back. It's now been 4 days though and I'm beginning to think I may have been penaslised.

This second site is more of an affiliate site but I do try to include lots of relevant unique content even so. Could it be because it's an affiliate site? All the affiliate links are no follow.

[imageworks-261290]

your going to need to give a little more info about your tactics, link building, etc.

[jeffreytrull1]

It's a bad sign if your site is nowhere to be found in the Google rankings. Are you sites still able to be found in Google? Or did the rankings just drop below the 3rd page?

Did you engage in any backlinking or other tactics that Google does not approve of? Are you registered with Google Webmaster tools? If yes, have you checked for any messages there?

[SamCUK]

No messages in webmaster tools.Do google always inform you? All the pages are still in the google index if I enter site:thenmyurl. It's just not showing in the top 100. In terms of link building I've posted in directories, used forum signatures, some reciprocal linking and I have set up blogs on high authority domains and posted content on them however I did post some of the same content on several blogs with links pointing to my site so that could look unnatural. The reason I did this though was I noticed a competitor that was ranking in the top 10 had used that strategy. It seems odd if I have been penalised because of that as they are still in the top 10.

[Mcarle]

Just because you buddy did not get caught speeding does not mean you won't.

Duplicate content doesn't help anyone.

Neither does forum signatures.

My question would be how many links did you gain in what about of time?

100+ in one week/month/year?

Did you add links slowly or just gain them all in one week?

If you just put up a site & all the sudden have hundreds of links to it... you might have been busted for unnatural linking...