I've started a number of free Blogger blogs (blogspot.com) and don't quite understand the search engine placement that they're receiving in Google results. Each blog is roughly 1 to 1.5 months old and have roughly 20 posts (per blog) that average 250 - 500 words per post. It is all original content that I have personally written. Yes, since they're affiliate marketing blogs, some of the content has been paraphrased when I'm highlighting and addressing specific product details. I don't see a way around this and it is a very minor portion of each post. I've used social bookmarking sites such as FolkD, Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon, Twitter, FriendFeed, etc. in an effort to do some basic backlinking. Upon submitting the post, I also submit the blog post title and URL to Pingomatic. I do have three other websites / blogs that are a number of years old and I have added links to these older blogs / websites to point to my new blogs from their sidebars. The links are not reciprocal. I haven't purchased any links, either. The traffic for the blogs (roughly after the first two weeks) was almost nonexistent in terms of receiving unique organic Google page views. Then, the next two weeks, some posts would start to rank nicely and each blog (collectively from the better ranking posts) would receive roughly 50 - 130 unique organic Google page views a day (all according to Google Analytics). After that, problems started for each blog. Overnight, the organic Google page views completely disappeared. For two blogs, this happened around March 25, 2011. The third blog (I started this one a little later), just hit the brick wall in the last two days and has disappeared too. Posts that were on the first page of Google are now nowhere to be found searching 10+ pages deep. However, some of my social bookmarking backlinks are showing up on page one of Google for the keyword phrase(s) I've optimized for. If I go to Google and check to ensure that each blog and their specific posts are indexed, they are. In fact, Google is currently picking up each new blog post almost instantly for each blog. I've continued to write new content despite the SERP disaster. Clearly, I'm baffled and I'm not quite sure what the issue is. I don't practice any black hat techniques that I'm knowingly aware of. I use Title tags and alt tags and have tried not to over optimize my pages. On each blog I have roughly 6 - 12 affiliate product links in the sidebar (the affiliate I am using is Amazon, no other affiliate links). Other than that, I have Google Adsense running on the page (using the built in modules given to us by Blogger) and, again, no other advertising links. Other than that, I have a few links in each article highlighting the product as well. With the Panda update, I thought that perhaps the Amazon affiliate product links in my sidebar may be too much, so, on one blog, I removed all of them so the only Amazon affiliate links I have on the blog are within each blog post, specific to the blog post. Despite these efforts, this blog hasn't shown any improvement and it's been over a week since I removed the extra Amazon affiliate links in the sidebar. With that said, I've researched different forums and understand that rankings are constantly dancing and that new blogs / sites will often rank well and then slip. Unfortunately, despite continuing to write new, original content, there are no signs that my rankings are coming back. For two of the blogs, it has now been nearly ten days since the traffic has fallen off of the cliff. Any suggestions as to what you think might be going would be greatly appreciated so that I can better understand what's happening and make any necessary improvements. Thank you in advance for your time and help!
Just read through the entire post and this stuck out the most. I would say you need to have some patience. A new sub-domain blog will bounce around in the SERPs for weeks, possibly months even before it continuously offers traffic results. Just keep building unique posts as well as getting a few backlinks to your blogs and over time you'll see results.