Google Kiss-O-DEATH!!! -950 penalty?

My site name is : besthoneysite

Well I am yet another webmaster who has been seemingly banned from the Google SERPS.

A bit of history:

My site is approximately 1 year old. About a month ago I switched from hosting on Weebly to a Godaddy hosted Wordpress based site. During this transition I switched from a www. domain to a non-www. domain. I began adding unique content and was being ranked in some cases on the first page of google. This didn't surprise me too much as my chosen niche is not very competitive.

I have a webmaster account and was tracking my site's improvements via the account. On 10/21/10 my site traffic and ranking on the SERPS was completely wiped out for ALL terms. After doing some research, I ran some tests to determine the extent and possible cause of this development. I discovered that while my site was not ranked in the first 500 search results for any of the previously ranking keyword terms it did still rank for a site:besthoneysite search and other related searches such as inurl:besthoneysite. In addition, all of my 46 or so URL's were also showing up on those queries.

I'm perplexed about the cause of what seems to be a Google penalty, and a significant one at that, on my site! I've identified the following as possible causes and would love to get more expert feedback and any additional possibilities from others wiser and more experienced than I.

1. Coding needs some cleaning according to a check w3 .com
2. I have a "do-follow" plugin enabled on the wordpress site because I believe in sharing. I've read though that maybe google would prefer that I be a little picky with my sharing.
3. Over-Optimization. I've done a good bit of on-page SEO work but nothing excessive and nothing that seems to violate Google terms. Maybe I'm mistaken?
4. Confusion of the www. or lack thereof on my URL.
5. Possible malware on my weebly based site. I rank on bing for a term like "manuka honey increase sperm count" Nowhere in that content did I ever include that type of language or anything else about sperm count. In the bing SERPS there is some "spammy" type stuff appearing in the "description" of the page. I have deleted the weebly account.

On my webmaster account google has now only indexed 8 URL's previously 46 URL's were indexed. I have seen this change from day to day either 46 or 8 since the "penalties" were levied. This is also supported when I do a search like site: besthoneysite. Many of the previously indexed URL's are missing.

I could be wrong but none of these things seems like a reason to have gotten such a sweeping and damaging action as what has happened. Would anyone else care to offer some other reason for this result or tell me I'm wrong in the previous statement? Thank you all in advance for your feedback!

I don't think you've been penalized. Stop keyword stuffing:
Put your keywords in your title

1. This is not the case. Yes, having really really obscure code might be a problem for Google, but most of the time it's alright. You can improve on this later, but it shouldn't be a priority. There is also no penalty at all for not validating according to W3C.

2. Do-following your comments isn't always bad per se. It can be bad though when users post comments on your website, simply linking to their own blog but adding nothing of value. Try putting a captcha on your website. Wordpress has many plugins that makes this easy. This might just scare away some of the human spammers on your blog.
(not saying there is spam on your blog. It's just a response to your question)

3. There is no such thing as over-optimization. If you've done something that's over the top, then you've done something that violates the Google Webmaster Guidelines, so no ...

4. You're redirecting the website: http://www.besthoneysite.com to http://besthoneysite.com with a 301 header. This is correct and does not pose a problem for Google.

5. I don't really know about your fifth question.

What is most likely the case, is that you have duplicate content on your website. You should check your website and its url structure? Is Google able to access the same thing through a different URL? If Google finds out that some of your pages display the same content, it will decide on its own which page to show of the two. This is reflected in the results when you do a "site:"-search. In my experience, I've found that this is most usually the case when seeing the number of indexed pages drop significantly.
Look into canonical-urls. Wordpress has a great plugin called "All in one SEO" that can take care of things quite nicely if correctly configured.

After that, you play the waiting game until Google picks up on it.

And of course, most important, don't forget to add new content once in a while so Google will think your site is important too. Getting backlinks (in a legit way) isn't a bad idea either :-)

Do you think that what you pointed out is enough to get me penalized like what I described in my earlier post? My keyword density is always under 6% so I don't think I'm really on the google radar for this. I'm open to being proved wrong however. Care to elaborate or site an example of how this happened to you?

Anyone else???

As per my opinion following is the reason for your penalty:

Looks like you are using the content copied from other site amazon.com:
http://www.copyscape.com/?q=http%3A%2F%2Fbesthoneysite.com%2F

If you want to earn money from Amazon Associate Program or simply Amazon Affiliate, try to use your own original content.

Little or no original content(Advice for Affiliates)
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66361

I am unable to find any title and meta tags on your home page. Did you deliberately removed the title and meta tags or you haven't placed them yet?

@ Singhvineet - Interesting theory. I used a plugin to pull data from Amazon posts for my "buy honey" area of the blog. I'm in the process of changing the content so that it is not a direct copy. I read the link and both the title of the link and the content of the link both indicated that not only the originality of the content but also the volume of original content might be an issue. Do you suspect that could be an issue on my site?

I'm concerned about the perceived value of the content on my site. Other than the amazon posts, I have not copied anything from anyone else. The ideas on my site are readily available on other sites but not in the form I present them. Does the fact that they can be found on google already mean that google suggests they have no value and would remove them from the SERPS? It would seem to me that using that logic would result in all but just a few new sites ever being in the SERPS since it would almost impossible to write about new, undiscussed topics as they've already been covered.

Maybe I'm just a little insecure because I'm getting torched in the google help forum about my content. Seems that's pretty typical of the so-called "experts" that frequent the boards there though.

Nah, they are legit. Don't try to let your ego get in the way of listening to solid advice. If the "experts" on the Google forum feel there is something wrong with your content, there likely is something wrong with your content. It seems you are writing websites for search engine's. Even if you stick to silly rules such as <6% keyword density, it doesn't stop you from writing mangled sentences such as the one KernelPanic pointed out.

Write unique informative quality content. Or don't.

If your site still appears in the site: command, then your site is not penalized. This is just the result of the phenomenon called the Google Dance. Your site will surely return to the previous rank when the dance subsides. There is no definite time anyway when the dance settles so just wait and continue with your link building.

There is no definite time for Google to stop dancing, but how long should you wait till before looking at other reasons why the site is not in the SERPS? I've struggled to see why my site might be getting penalised in the same way as evions_daddy, and the site appears fine in site:mydomain.com etc. My research has concluded me to hope its the Google Dance but its now been over two weeks and the worry is growing.

I gotta say that I'm not sure I agree with what you said at all! According to the research I've done, there are lots of different google "penalties" some which remove you from the SERPS completely and some which just set you back a few positions. I think your blanket statement is a little too "blanket" for my tastes. Would you care to support what you're saying with some evidence?

That's not the way to go, write your own content.

I agree. I should have been more clear. I am not editing the existing copy but rather writing my own. Thanks for making me clarify.

Thanks for your input! I'm sure some are great and yeah I have tried to keep my ego at bay. I have taken a couple of things to heart and I do plan to go back rewrite a lot of my content so that it reads more fluidly.

I just don't care for the arrogance that some people on the google help board exhibit. There is constructive criticism and then there is just negativity.