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4.E.3 OOOPS my rankings are misplaced

First of all - don't panic! There are plenty of possible reasons for the lost of positions and not all of them are results of Google penalty. Here are a few causes:

1. Your competitors are not sleeping
This happens quite often. While your site was rising in the SERPs ranking, other sites’ ranking fell. So following the same logic, if other site owners developed their SEO while you didn’t, their sites will you rank, bringing yours down. This loss of position may be by a few ranks only, or much more depending on various factors. So wake up and get back to work.

2. Some of your inbound links were filtered out or devalued
This will occur if Google devalued the backlinks you placed on other sites. If Google judges your link irrelevant or of low quality, its value will be decreased by them, it may even be filtered out. This may also be due to factors you have no control upon. For example if one of the sites linking to you lost its trust rating for some reason, or saw its quality drop, the strength of your links will drop greatly.

Your links losing their value may have an instant, or slow and regular effect on your ranking. One way to counter that is by continuously placing links on high PR websites.

3. New ranking algorithm introduced
Google may update its ranking algos to increase the search’s quality, this may affect your site either positively or negatively. Usually their key objective is to counter blackhat methods and to make sure visitors get appropriate contents.

The most effective methods to avoid the negative impacts of the updates are:

A) keep your site’s quality at a high level,
B) by keeping your neighborhood clean,
C) having valuable links from relevant high PR websites,
D) read this guide and gain from the loss of those who didn’t and went down in SERPs,
E) and obviously avoid using blackhat methods.

If you manage to do all this perfectly you may even be among those to benefit
such updates.

4. On-site problems
We all make mistakes, so sometime the issue is not Google, but your own site. The most common case is when you buy a new domain name and transfer your website to it, but do not setup a redirect ftom the old one correctly. So the links are now pointing to non-existing pages and Google has no other choice but remove them from the index. The other common situation happens when your hosting provider changes some script execution rules and your dynamic pages suddenly stop working returning with 404 or 503 or any other server-side error. If your ranking are going down - check your website first.

5. Penalty
Google will penalize your website if you use blackhat techniques like hidden links, link farms etc. You wont actually know you have been penalized by Google, they will simply apply the penalty according to your infraction. So you wont know if your ranking fell due to a penalty or other reasons. But if you knowingly used blackhat methods, take care of that fast. Also verify that nothing about could have indirectly earned you a penalty (bad neighborhood).

Finally check that your content is relevant to your keywords. Here are a few advices from Google My site isn't doing well in search.

6. Site is banned
This means that your site has been excluded from search engine’s index for using major blackhat methods or going against the Google Webmaster Guidelines. To know if your site has been banned, type the search query site:mysite.com on Google, mysite.com standing for your website’s URL. If you don’t get any result then it means your site got banned. This may also mean that your site has never actually been crawled. One way to solve this is by removing all the blackhat contents from your website an submit your site to Google again. .

Here are a few things to do to avoid losing your rankings:

A) Don’t use blackhat methods.
B) Don’t stop updating your site.
C) Use original contents with information your readers need.

Doing this will most likely keep you from having any trouble with causes 2-6.