I've been pretty good with the search engine rankings for sites for ages.. I've had #1 ranking on some nice keyword phrases, and never had trouble getting a site ranked well. I don't use tricks, just follow the rules and try to use some common sense. So I was caught totally off guard recently when I noticed that two sites that I had built up to great rankings were suddenly waaaay down in the rankings.. and if I went into the Google sitemaps site it showed that the site was indexed but had no query stats (odd.. it had been #1 in results for months..), and their "page analysis" showed good keywords. Googlebot was visiting the sites on a regular basis. The sites had always been on the same server and I have high ranking sites on the same server (so it's not an IP address penalty thing). I hadn't redesigned the sites or changed code, and nothing really stood out that I felt could explain the loss in rankings.

Then it hit me - I had started advertising for the sites with adwords. Hmm.. so I did some checking on the keywords that I was advertising with (via adwords) and tried putting those phrases into Google. You know what? The sites didn't show up in the top 300 for most of those phrases. Yikes. I remembered that the credit card I set up for adwords was lost and cancelled and I had gotten one of those nasty "your payment was denied" e-mails. So.. could it be that Google penalized the sites for that? Others have thought the same.

Now I've read many times that adwords don't affect "organic" ranking, so who knows for sure.. it might be something totally unrelated. There's no way to tell for certain what caused the drop in rankings, but I'm pretty certain it wasn't something I did.