I had a website which is almost Three year old. From last two years it’s performing very well in SERP until last Month (Oct 2011). Usually it gets 900-1000 per day visits through Google but suddenly on 11th of October its Google Organic traffic drops down to ~450 and then on 12th of October it went down to ~100 per day. Currently (25-Nov) it is getting around 60-80 visits per day through Google. I opened my Google Analytics and WebMaster-Tools Account and found that the traffic coming from many of the keywords had decreased badly plus the numbers of long-long-tailing keywords also decreased. The competitive keywords who usually sent 6000-1500 visits per month are now sending only dozens or no traffic at all. Weird part is that I cannot confirm my website on SERP for such competitive keywords.(Added: completely removed from the SERP) Now I am scarred to give it back links since I haven’t practiced OffPage SEO from 14 months for that website. (Added:However around 10-15 natural back link are coming every month through bloggers and forum discussions etc.) Is it that what we known as the Google SandBox? Or is it Google Penalty? I just called it the Google Slap. Kindly share your views and opinions about this situation. Also do suggest me a remedy to get everything back on the track. [Added: I am curious to know the Reason why my traffic went down from 1k daily to 100 per day]
this is exactly why your site dropped in ranking and you are getting lot less visitors than before. no link building for 14 months is way to long. google found no activity for the site for which your ranking was adjusted accordingly. while you were enjoying your traffic and revenue for the last 14 months, your competitors were building links and eventually outranked you. you WILL have to start building backlinks again and with a carefully planned campaign, you will slowly gain back the ranking and traffic.
perhaps you lost some of the links to your site that were helping your rankings. Maybe your competitors increased the seo. It is hard to say without a thorough investigation. There really is no such thing as the google sandbox. It could be a penalty, but I cant say for sure without investigating. Maybe your site has been infested with a virus, without your knowledge, or perhaps you are using on page seo techniques which are against google's policy, such as keyword stuffing, hidden text, etc..
Natural Links are coming every month from blogs and forum discussions. Also if only that is the reason then my website should had came down gradually not suddenly like it happened. It had gone down from 1000/day to 100/day with 48hrs also I am not able to see my website on the serp for my top competitive keywords. Its is completely De-indexed. So I dont agree with your View.