Had suspicious spike in Adsense clicks, next day site ranking tanks

[bizzer]

Yesterday, one of my sites had extreme Adsense clicks for several hours in the morning, which brought it up to CTRs of around 120%. My normal CTR is about 10-15%. It added several hundred dollars income over and above my normal amount.  After that, it went back to normal. I have waited to see if Google would adjust the income down, as someone or some bot seemingly clicked the heck out of the site's ads.  Nothing has been adjusted; it's been 24 hours.

Question #1: what usually causes this type of insane clicking to occur (i.e. competitors messing me?)

Then, today I noticed something else disturbing. I cannot find my site in the top 100 SERPs for the main keyword.  I was at #1 for a couple years, then, when I changed themes from Thesis to Genesis (site otherwise exactly the same) a couple months ago, I bounced around various positions on the first page. In the last couple weeks we've been bouncing between the teens and the thirties.  Two days ago we were at #15.  (the site is still indexed when I use "site:" to check.

It seems awfully coincidental that yesterday I had the Adsense click explosion, and today I'm not even in the top 100 for the first time in my pretty stable two-year history, and have no idea how far behind 100 I am.  I went to Google Webmaster Tools and see no errors or warnings relating to this. Adsense has not sent me any messages. So...

Question #2: does Google search apply some sort of penalty to site that have suspicious Adsense clicking?

By the way, I don't have any funny business going on with any bad SEO practices, it's all above board, and I have thousands of real readers each day Liking and commenting on the pages. It's a very real site.  Note: I have been checking the ranking each day via a Google Incognito window and searching for the term. Of course I use MOZ but I do the Incognito search for a quick real time check, which I've found to be accurate.

[MoosaHemani]

If I had the domain name I would have better consult you in this regard but at the moment there are lot of maybe’s in my answer.

Here I go!

Adsense click explosion:

There can be multiple good and bad reasons for this:

There is a strong possibility that your competitors have done something stupid that increase your adsense click ratio to be insanely high and on the other hand there is a possibility that some of your powerful readers (with a big fan following on social networks) share some of your stuff that result in more clicks than normal.

One thing is sure that any problem with adsense should not result in ranking drops.

Drop in Rakings:

There are multiple possibilities when it comes to ranking drop:

Check your link profile and see if you find anything suspicious there in-case of yes you probably should look in to your link profile and clean as many links as possible. Also, give another look to your website and see if all SEO factors are available and not really missing anything.

Usually change in theme affect the website rankings negatively, in that case my advice is to plan a content marketing strategy that bring you some quality new links that point back to your website.

If the ranking drop is due to the change in theme, the drop probably will be temporary and will be fixed accordingly.

Hope this helps!