3 year old site thrown from #1 to page 6 for top keyword

My domain is almost 3 years old. In the beginning I was ranking first for the keyword, but after little over a year, I was thrown to page 6. Traffic dropped a lot, but I tought nothing of it, hoping it would return after a short while. More than a year later, the site is still on that 6th page. The keyword has no competition, because there's no money in it and it's just the name of the site. But it gets a few hundred searches per day by people looking for my site.

The funny thing is that most of the sites ranking high for my keyword are domain price calculators, domain tools sites, alexa, advertising sites, ... all ABOUT MY DOMAIN. Needless to say, I get quite a lot of traffic from them (because they get traffic and link to my site).

Can anyone help me?
Because I don't know what I can do to get on the first page again. I don't think it's the sandbox effect because it's on page 6. It must be some sort of penalty, but I don't know what or why and Google has never given me a reason (although I've asked a few times). There are a few issues with the site (duplicate content, duplicate meta tags, ...), but those are only a few inner pages and not on the main page. I also got a badware/malware warning 3 times because of a bad sponsor, but those warnings were removed within 2 days.

Can I post the domain and the keyword here?
It's an adult site.

 

Anyone?
Perhaps I should give a reward to the person that can help me get back in the ranking.

 

We cannot really help unless you give us the domain and keyword phrase you 'think' it should be ranking well for. If you're worried about posting the link just insert (dot) everywhere a '.' appears in the URL like:

http://www(dot)example(dot)com/pagename.html

 

You can see the url and keyword here:
http://tonefish.com/url.txt

 

Was the site indexed during that time? If so, google can yank a site down in the SERPs pretty darn quick.

 

I have a suspicion that it may be a penalty for not varying your link anchor text enough. I think a large percentage of your backlinks all say 'gallery dump'. I have seen webpages get penalized to the 6th page for just one keyword because they used the exact same link anchor text too frequently.

 

No, the warning pages were there before, but mostly after the ranking drop.

That sounds like a plausible explanation. Can anything be done about it? I didn't really ask webmasters for a specific anchor text when linking, but that text is the only obvious link text.

 

i c your site ranking #1 for your term. looks like something to do with the datacenter results

 

I see the result as well and I think you are so lucky with that 1 million search result,for me having site rank 1 with 33 million search result is means nothing hit komic words now,and will ou find I am number 1 at 33 million search with low traffic from search engine

 

Isn't that Alexa at #1? Are you searching for the hyphenless version?

 

give u r domain name and keyword for review

 

Posted earlier:

 

Hi,

Have you check your site in sandbox ????
If you have check it than i think it is Google Fluctuation.
I have also noticed that kind of Fluctuation for my several keywords.

So, Best of Luck for your site !!

 

I thought Sandbox meant 'not in the search results at all'?
I thought of fluctuations too, but it has been hovering between position 50 and 60 for over a year now (since Dec 2007).

 

I removed most of the duplicate content pages and moved to a faster server. I hope it brings improvement to my ranking.

 

It happens all the time even for older domains..

You might not be watching your competitors enough..Their number of backlinks, promotional strategies and such.

 

Hey..
I think You have tried all possible ways right..

 

Have you looked at the high ranking sites?
They're almost all pages with info about my site. That or pages that accidently contain the words. I have competition, but their site names are variations of my site name, not the same thing. So they rank for their site names.

I'm pretty sure there's some kind of punishment, because it went from a very strong #1 to page 6 overnight.