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Hello to the Moz Community, Let me start by saying, we are not an SEO company.  We are the in-house agency for our parent corp, and the 7 companies in their portfolio.  We manage their PPC and other digital items.  None of the companies use an SEO company.  Their "SEO strategy" is to not have one.  They internally post on their own Social Media account, their own Blog, and send out their own Press Releases (which we help write the copy sometimes). One of the accounts encountered a very bizarre, and serious ranking problem around Dec 25th-30th. In the past when you Googled the company's brand name you would get 5-6 pages of internal content show up at the very Top of the results.  Pages like Home Page, Blog Home, Contact Us, About Us, Client Reviews Page, etc. (core pages). There were then several other non core pages that would show up in the Top 20 results (my recollection is they controlled about 12-14 of the Top 20 results for the brand name). Unfortunately, around Dec. 25th this all cratered.  And the only internal page that would display when you Googled the brand name was the Home Page (totally gone; even checking 100 rankings deep).  So the question we have spend weeks trying to figure out is, what in the heck happened? We got together with the company to find out any and all possible changes or things could of happened since the first of December, which could have contributed to this cratering.  Here is what we found: #1  The company made an acquisition of a smaller competitor in 2014.  Around Dec. 10th they sent out a great press release announcing the acquisition.  Since the press release was involving someone in the TV/radio advertising agency industry it was very popular (the best release they ever put out). The release was picked up by over 100 high page rank local TV stations, all across the U.S. (along with the normal companies that pick up online releases). The headline of the release was "Brand Name Reviews Assets of TV Ad Agency Competitor."  Most of the stations that picked it up placed "Do not follow" links, but it was still an amazingly successful release. #2  Around Dec. 15th this 8 year old company received their first negative "client review."  The review was not from a real client though, it was posted on Rip-Off report by a fake client, the Internet Mafia (reputation management co.) or a former employee/contractor.  The posting was deliberately optimized.  The URL and the Title Tag contained all sort of words like "Reviews" "Complaints" the "Domain Name," and the Company Brand Name (whoever did it, knew what they were doing). #3  Towards the end of December and into January the company received 6-8 bizarre root domain links.  The links show to of come from domains that were just registered in November/December.  Yet the domain name was already voluntarily forfeited by the beginning of January.  Google Webmaster Tools is still showing the links, but when you go to the domain "all it shows is "cannot be found."  WHOIS has screenshots of all of them though.  Here is one:  http://www.domaintools.com/research/screenshot-history/lizardeyephoto.com/  The domains themselves had nothing to do with the type of business this client account operates in, but the information after the / contained partial pieces of the company brand name.  Here is an example: http://www.martygraveyard.com/buying-inexpensive-vehicles-at-on-line-community-automobile-auctions/  I personally don't think 6-8 new root domains could crater a website with 290 root domains (and 1500 links), but maybe those domains/sites are somehow "cloaked;" and they are actually showing bad information to the bots/spiders, but us humans can't see it?  I honestly am not educated enough on the subject to know... #4  In mid January, three of the brand name pages returned:  Home Page, About Us, Blog Home.  However, the other pages are nowhere to be found.  The companies Contact Us page, Client Reviews page (which used to rank 2nd), and all of the other Top 20 pages are totally gone.  They are still indexed if you do a "site:brandname.com" search, but they won't show up when you Google the brand name. #5  Search results are almost identical with Bing and Google. So, here is the million dollar question:  was our client's Brand Name deliberately attacked via an N-SEO Black Hat attack, in an effort to get it their internal pages to drop out of the rankings?  Or did Google and Bing incorrectly issue some sort of partial penalty on certain pages due to the amazing success (and them believing it was some sort of link buying scheme) of the Press Release that was sent out at the beginning of December? If you read to the bottom of this, I am grateful for you doing so.  Thanks in advance for anyone who tries to help us and our in-house client. Jake