This is probably the most stressful story I'll ever share on here. Last year my main income source (an affiliate site I'd been growing for 3 years) just... disappeared from Google. Like, literally went from page 1 for my main keywords to nowhere. I was freaking out. Spent two weeks checking everything - server logs, analytics, search console. Nothing obvious. The traffic drop graphs looked like a cliff. 80% gone in 48 hours. The worst part? I had no clue if it was a penalty or just an algorithm update. Google's documentation is... let's say "not super helpful" when you're panicking at 2 AM wondering if your business just died. I remember calling my developer friend Mike (poor guy, I probably woke him up) asking "how do I even know if Google hates my site now?" He was like "dude, there's gotta be tools for this." Turns out there were some tools, but they were either crazy expensive (like $300/month expensive) or gave me reports I couldn't understand. I needed something that would just tell me "yes, you're penalized" or "no, this is probably an algorithm thing." So I started digging into Google's penalty patterns. Learned way more about manual actions, algorithmic penalties, and ranking fluctuations than I ever wanted to know. Took me about 3 months of research and another 2 months of coding to build what became ContentAnalyzerPro. The ironic part? My original site actually wasn't penalized - it was just hit by a core update. But by then I'd already built this penalty checker that actually worked better than the expensive tools I'd tried. Now it helps other people avoid those 2 AM panic sessions I went through. Still gives me anxiety thinking about that traffic drop though Has anyone else been through a sudden ranking drop like this? How did you figure out what happened? I swear Google keeps us all guessing sometimes.