Are we penalized?

[civiseo]

Thanks for taking the time to reply on the previous question.

For discussion, do you experienced any drastic changes on your target keywords these past few weeks? Penguin 2.0 and Panda are still on a multi-week rolling update according to Matt Cutts. Feel free to share. Thanks.

[jesse-landry]

Publishing press releases is essentially expensive black hat in this day and age. That's not going to help you. Probably won't destroy you, but might knock you over the edge if you were on the verge before.

Sounds to me like you were penalized but I'd have no way of knowing without:

a.) your domain

b.) your targeted keywords

c.) your link-building history (what do you do to build links?)

What I can tell you is that's a hefty drop and the algorithm is updated all the time.

[KevinBudzynski]

Back to Jesse's C-Did you analyze your link profile? Did you pay for any links? Are the Press Releases of good quality? It's really tough to diagnose without more info. It could be related to an algo update, penalty (hidden text, thin content, link farm),  canonicalization issue, server issue and so on.

[jesse-landry]

Yeah not to get preachy here but this is something I notice often on this forum. People come and say "why is my site _____" or "am i being indexed?" or whatever and it's impossible to say without any information other than the question being posed.

It's like calling up an auto mechanic and saying "hey my car stopped working can you tell me how to fix it?" and expecting an answer without further details.

Anyway I'm sorry don't mean to jump on your case just trying to help others further on that make the same mistake.

What I notice is that the people who provide more information in their Questions get better Answers and more help.

[Sarbs]

First thing to check is your messages in webmaster tools. If its a penalty Google will communicate that to you through here and let you know the type of penalty. Then you can look into fixing it.

If its an algo related drop then as has already been mentioned, we would need a little more info to do some digging.