I'm sorta new to Search Optimization for competitive keywords. I have a blog type site with original content that I'm trying to rank for a keyword with about 100K in quotes. I release articles every 2 days. The domain has a suffix on the keyword. There are other sites like mine in the top 10. There is good on page SEO. The site was indexed on the first day but not visible in the main index(only via site or info), Google bot is checking the site a many times a day, and updated the main index again yesterday(after 6 days). Yesterday it was ranking around 200 with the keyword and suffix - today it is not ranking at all. A visitor here and there the finds the site thru some of the articles. I don't believe it was sandboxed because its definately in the index. I did social media, rss, and about 50 backlinks to the site and articles, as well as an unrelated forum that I put the site in the sig and I have like 1000 posts in the past. I also used the anchor text with the suffix by mistake, but I changed it back to the keyword I want to rank for. I'm wondering why I was thrown off for the keyword? Maybe all the forum backlinks are being counted as spam? The site is 13 days old btw. Does this sound right?
In how many days did you do all those links, articles...etc? If they appear in short period of time - google might consider them spam because it's not normal.
I'll start with what you mentioned about those signature links. You won't get credit for your previous 1000+ posts on that forum that you put the link in your sig (if it worked that way I would have 20,000+ links from other forums). Bots tend to stop crawling old forum posts because they're not being updated so there's no reason to check them. So only new posts will get you links and then you have to figure how many posts go through forums daily and realize there is a chance that not every post will get indexed. On to your site age. Your site is 13 days old. If your site gets sandboxed it will still be indexed. The sandbox is essentially Google's way of seeing if a webmaster will continue working on their site normally while it's buried in the SERPs or if they'll give up and move on. If they give up and move on, the sandbox has worked its magic and Google now knows that website was junk so they can bury it further. I recommend you keep working on your site. I bet within 2 months it pulls out of the sandbox and starts seeing some decent rankings. You've got to remember, you're doing SEO work here. Nothing is instant and you have to have a lot of patience and a lot of motivation if you want to be any good at this. I would say the most likely cause of your website getting poor rankings (if you're done great on-page SEO and built a good number of quality links) would be the sandbox. But it's not a big deal if you actually care about what you're doing. You could come out of the sandbox tomorrow or in 2 months. You just never know. So if this website is something you want to seriously pursue, then keep writing your articles (remember to check your keywords and have a decent density) and keep building links.
I agree with Philoon, it is just way to early to tell anything about search engines, backlinks can take 2 weeks to be found themselves. Keep adding unique content on your site, have some backlinks point to inner pages. Use keywords as a title for your images. Try and get backlinks from other higher page rank in your same niche.
Thanks for the advice! I'm thinking - Maybe I should lay off for a week or so until the rest of the articles publish on the blog? I did do a lot of back linking and articles in the past few days.
Also, one more thing, yahoo site explorer picked up about 10% of all my old forum posts as backlinks. I don't know if google does the same...
Keep on building links and building up your article queue. Consistent link building will be a big key in maintaining a high rank once you get there and if you have a bunch of article written ahead of time, you can take a week and go on vacation or whatever without worrying about having to write articles while you're out having fun.