I would like to get some input on this... I have a website policeacademyinfo.com . It is a Wordpress blog, that was ranking #5 for the term Police Academies... A few weeks later it is not showing at all for that term.... Then a few weeks later it comes back to #5.... The site has been around for over 3-4 years.... It should not be a sandbox issue, but I could be wrong. On Yahoo and MSN it still ranks very well and has maintained those rankings. Any ideas of what could be going on? Thanks in advance for any constructive ideas!
I had a quick glance at google after searching 'Police Academies'. A lot of the sites they are huge authority sites such as wikipedia and I seen a .gov site there as well. Google does a 'dance' every so often and its search algorithm changes slightly and so pages will get ranked differently. Just make sure you update your site frequently with relevant information and build up the back links as well to help increase the sites importance in google's eyes.
Do you use Google Analytics? What about Google's Webmaster Tools? If not, install a WordPress Plugin for Analytics and get started with Webmaster Tools. Both are free and can provide great stats and let you define how quickly your site is crawls and to what users to appeal to.
I dont know if its related to your ranking jumping around, but you have some keyword spam on your home page. The keywords "Police Academies" is repeated at least 58 times on your home page alone. I know its at least 58 because that is where I stopped counting. Those two words make up the majority of the words on your home page. I suggest you add some more content that discusses the police field, and without the words "Police Academies" and dilute the keyword spam. In the meta description, you only need to say the keyword once, not 3 times. A meta description like "Police Academy news and information" is all that you need. Overall, I think that your site is full of keyword spammage. Clean it up a little bit, post some more articles and dilute the spam with some mayonnaise, slice of cheese and a couple of pieces of bread. then you have a spam sandwich, instead of just spam.
Man, I fully subscribe to the keyword sandwich concept here: makes me wonder how you manage to rank at all...
Are there any errors reported in Webmaster Tools. One of my friends sites went missing from page 1 to page 18. It turned out there were a number of 404 errors encountered by the crawler, this was 70% of his site missing in Google's eyes. After a few 301 redirects he was back on track. I also know that wordpress has a tendency of corrupting the .htaccess file, so it's worth double checking your redirects are all up to scratch otherwise the crawlers see more 404's!
Google uses hundreds of different databases. It could be that when you were searching and couldn't be found that the request went to a database that didn't have you indexed or didn't have you ranked as highly as some of the other databases. I've seen this happen on occasion with my site as well, with me either getting completely removed for a particular search term for a day or two and then coming back up, or showing up as #5 or 6 when I'd previously been #1. Also remember that if you are logged into a Google service (gMail, adsense, adwords) and then search, Google also takes your own preferences and search history into account. If you log out of that Google service and clear your cookies (or better yet try a different computer entirely), you might see different results for the keywords.
not sure, how, when, and why this happens. but it has happened to my sites before. The page rank goes up and down, but, right now I'm ranking well so I haven't pursued that issue. I'm still trying to get more back links and updating my site frequently with new and valuable information.
It could be due to change in their algorithms. Or maybe they are not too pleased with your keyword stuffing as other posters suggested. Are you ranking notably different for other keywords as well?
I also experienced this same scenario and until now my keywords did not came back and until now I don't know what to do. Some say that continue your link building did you do that? Is it effective?