Things to know before you read. 1) I began my site in July of 2008 2) I used to get around 200+ views a day, mostly organic. 3) My site has no set niche. People come for specific articles. The Situation. All traffic on my site generally comes for specific articles. Nobody comes through my home page because my site has no set niche. (I know. Not the best idea, but I do have some other niche sites that do well.) Anyhow, after August, my traffic has gone way down. I used to be on page one for many of my article's keywords which could be found in their title and h2 tag. Example: The title of my post, "Hannah Montana Shower Picture Fake," used to rank #1 on Google broad search in many different variations. "Shower Hannah Montana." ; "Hannah Montana Fake Shower." The list goes on. I have now completely fallen off the charts for this article and many articles on my site alike. Not all articles, but most. My questions 1) Am I sand boxed? 2) How long does it take to get out of the sandbox? 3) In the mean time, what should I do? 4) Continue to write articles? 5) Gain back links? (which I have heard is pointless now)
I used to be in the sandboxed too. that time it took about 1 month then my site was ranking nowhere in my keywords. Later it came back to its own ranks and still ok till now. maybe you can just wait. you can check by type "site:www.yoursite.com" to see that your site still indexed or not.
NO i dont think that your site is sandboxed. have you done some sort of link building for those internal pages/posts like social bookmarking or something else ?
no but if you do that quite a bit, you'll see your internal pages/posts getting ranked really quickly on google but then after sometime they'll disappear and after sometime you'll see them again ranking for those keywords but that would might not be the case with everyone =)
social bookmarking means you won't get stable traffic right? this is your problem probably your pages are not strong enough so you dropped in the rankings.
Hey, Is it over SMO? Well, I also experienced same situation for one of my blogs as you explained? I started to submit my posts in various bookmarking sites and my blog was getting too much traffic which I was not expected but then my blog was disappeared from Google ranking and now again it has become stable with around 200+ visits. What is it?
Dude. it has nothing to do with that guys. Most of my traffic was organic. Came from Google. After google did whatever it did, my views have drastically dropped.
i am not sure what it is and why it happens but it does happen if you are doing some good social bookmarking of your internal pages, to avoid it you should not submit your site to more than 3 sb sites/day but i am not even sure about that - trying many things - lets see which one works =)
It depends how you did your SEO. In my case I have used too much phrase "cool pictures" and when I reached the first page I repeated that one few times more and then I have been removed from all positions on Google. So you must pay attention on SEO. One of my friend told me before few months that he was placed again with specific word on Google SE, but it took few months when his website was removed. So if rally some kind of "sand box" exist probably there is a way out.