Google penalties?

[SimonW]

Website on which we have an affiliate scheme has just sunk dramatically in Google rankings.

Nothing obvious in webmaster tools.

Although the number of external links has dropped by a couple of hundred or so. It still has 1600.

Given the number of active affiliates I doubt it is the affiliate schemes causing it, we know them.

I have a fair few ideas of possible causes, and many more on things we could do to improve ranking, but there are too many possibilities to rely on eliminating them one by one, and then I'll never know what worked.

Last time I saw a drop with this site, the navigation scheme on the sites pages had got HTML markup that Googlebots couldn't follow, which was fun to identify but easily fixed.

So if we assume it is a penalty, what can I do other than try and find Matt Cutt's email address?

[shakir]

Almost sites ( SEOs) working with cookie filling so .. google can not penalize it... then need to empty the SERP... So may be any other issue... Do not have any ide about the Email of Matt Cutt's

[lethal0r]

one of mine has too. no idea why. and yet bizarelly the pagerank went up today but the site is still not ranking well!

[dougs]

Get more good quality links and vary anchor text........good links have a tendency to overcome many penalties.

Doug

[Jack Russell]

I think sudden drop in external links might have dropped your rankings. You might have have lost some quality links which is the reason why your rankings might have dropped. You need to focus more on quality back links to achieve your rankings.You need to be patient here as google will take some time to update the rankings once you gain more backlinks.

[peterlee]

Page rank affects only about 20% of how well your sites rank in the search engines so maybe this explains it. So page rank is really not that important, ranking is.

one of mine has too. no idea why. and yet bizarelly the pagerank went up today but the site is still not ranking well!

[amisuggests]

it's not the number of links but the value of the links. You said you have dropped some links but if they are high PR links could make all the difference. I had the same problem and found that some PR7 links had become devalued [whatever that means]
If you incured a penalty, your webmaster tools account would tell you

I think you should focus on getting more links to your site