Can an organic results ban also affect paid search results?

Hi,
one of my client recently have seen its organic rankings drop sharply in a way that ressemble to a ban from search engines. It isn't a "real ban" since the site is still indexed (site and appearing on branded searches, but organic traffic and position have decreased sharply, so there is someting wrong. Surprisingly, it has also affected his PPC account since his number of impression also dropped sharply, which a corresponding decrease in clicks. The client wasn't involved in hardcore black hat SEO, he just had an outgoing link on its homepage going to his website designer site, which might have been perceived as a paid link by search engines (and I don't know why, since it's a very regular practice).

It's the first time I see paid search results affected by organic results. Is it possible that the "ban" might have affected negatively the Adwords account quality score?

Thanks
Update:
PS. Don't worry, this client his in a very legit business (no gambling, porn, get rich fast,..)

re: "...so there is someting wrong..."

not really, no. this is NORMAL google rankings behaviour...in that when they update their thousands of servers with index changes/algo changes, that means that many millions of sites rankings change. this is normal. many many here have been complaining of just this kind of issue.....as to the 'why' of those posts all I can think is that these site owners are just too new to G and how things work.

get used to it. it will not change and IMHO, this serp wave or churn will happen at even closer timelines....ie serps will change on a daily basis -- I do believe that will happen soon.

so, how do you get back "up" in serps? read & learn from what you read here. test and analyze....and get backlinks from trust/authoritative sites....and your numbers will rise....failure to do so, will keep you below where you "think" you should be....

;)

Jim

I have a friend who is managing PPC campaign of a client. He tells me that when the PPC campaign has low quality score the rankings are also affected and rankings are fluctuate.