Agreed.  Except I refuse to spend more on Google PPC - I went the other way and reduced spend.  If they penalize us for no reason the last thing I want to do is give them money!  I could understand if we intentionally did something wrong, but that fact that a dozen top webmasters have all given different advice and can't point to anything concreate leads me to believe that everyone is to some extent guessing (even though some thoughts were excellent and everyone was well intentioned).

Hi Georg, I read through these posts and felt as though our issues are almost identical.  I got hit a month or two ago and wasn't sure why.  We have been in business for years and never had an issue (of course our rankings have moved up and down over the years). We lost (like no where to be found) at least two huge keywords on our home page and about 25% of our overall business.  I have 5 people and already had to lay off one. The scary part is we have no idea why.  While I am sure we are doing some things wrong, we don't know what.  I have had a bunch of great suggestions and have been addressing them (but everyone has a different thought as to what is causing it).  Still no luck with getting the keywords back. I have reduced keywords, reduce crawl errors, changed content, etc, etc.

I will keep watching this thread in the hope that I learn something as panic is an understatement at this point!