If an estabished adult site doesn’t rank for it’s own name, then there’s a penalty. Manual penalties are noted in Webmaster Tools. If you don’t see that, then it’s some sort of algorithmic penalty. With Panda just out – I’d start my thinking along those lines, though it seems it started a week after Panda – so maybe not.

Another option is that you’ve done something stupid and googlebot can’t access your site or thinks you don’t want your site indexed. Check your robots.txt file. But usually problems like that happen over a few days, not overnight (been there, done that – ).

And BTW, please don’t use the word “hit” – it doesn’t have an actual meaning. Are you talking about visits? (New visits or all visits?) Or are you talking about page hits? Or are you talking about unique visitors? In another thread you said you went from 105K “hits” to 6K “hits”. That makes me think you’re looking at “all visits” (or “sessions” as Google now calls them).

Google traffic is mostly new visitors – on my sites it’s about 2/3rds new visitors overall, and 3/4 new visitors for blogs. If you’re at 6% returning visitors then that’s extremely low and it indicates that the site in question is a “low quality” site. Panda’s purpose in life is to weed out low quality sites – so it would seem Panda did its job in your case.

That’s pretty serious. You’re doing something that is considered “black hat”. You’ve just lost all trust with Google. Assuming the bulk of your (good) traffic come from Google – you’re sorta screwed.

Based on what you said below I don’t think you really understand the nature of your penalty. What they’re saying is that you are not showing the same exact thing to googlebot that you show to regular users. That’s a HUGE no-no.

“Obviously the site doesn’t contain any redirect.”

Obviously? We don’t know what site it is. Nothing is obvious – especially from someone who gets slapped with a manual cloaking penalty.

“Probably it’s just the script that keeps track of traffic.”

Describe the script. Chances are you need to robots exclude all pages where it’s used.

But I can’t see a traffic script causing a cloaking penalty unless the script sends googlebot one place and regular visitors another place.

“I’ve written a long review letter where I explain how things on the site work. I’ve also added the check result with some tools that report the site as “cloaking free”.

How long does this step usually take? Hours? Days? Weeks? The problem is clearly a false positive.

Btw I went from 105.000 daily visits from Google to 0.”

What you’ve done isn’t good enough. The ban will continue. Google wants to see that you’ve fixed the problem. They will not lift the ban just because you say what you did should be OK. They don’t care what you think. They’ve had a real, live person look at your site and they’ve determined what you’re doing is black hat. Find the problem, get rid of it completely, and apologize profusely and promise to never do anything like that again.

Just wondering, why not tell us what the site in question is?

I never understood all the secrecy on these boards. Maybe you are overlooking something that is plain obvious to an outsider.

Or someone filed a complaint against your site and they looked and didn’t like what they saw. One of my sites used to be scraped by another site. When googlebot went to the site they saw my content, but when a visitor clicked on the listing in the SERPs they got different content. My guess is you have something like that on your site. It evaded detection, but your time is up.

I’d also mention that this penalty will most likely affect all your other sites as well. Google spends a great deal of energy determining who owns what and who manages what. You as a webmaster are now part of a “bad neighborhood” and if you don’t get yourself out of it quickly Google will assume similar things are going on with your other sites as well and you’ll start seeing traffic on them falling. Trust is a big deal with Google, and they no longer trust you.