I've started all of my sites in the past 6 months. And was wondering if they are currently in the so called "Google Sandbox". According to the linkdomain: command on Yahoo, my below three sites have link counts between (2000 - 6000) links each. My oldest site is 6 months old (site 1). and I have a few other sitest that are 5 months old (site 2) and 4 months old (site 3). Site 1 and Site 2 are on the same server. Site 3 is hosted by a different company on a different server. For site 1 (6 months old): Initially my sites even after 2 - 3 months, there were 19,000 - 21,000 pages indexed in Google. Now there are 2,430 pages indexed. The decline did not happen all at once, it has been a slow decline of 3 months. For site 2 (5 months old): Initially my sites even after 2 - 3 months, there were 13,000 - 16,000 pages indexed in Google. Now there are 1,000 pages indexed. The decline did not happen all at once, it has been a slow decline of 3 months. For site 3 (4 months old): Initially my sites even after 1 - 2 months, there were 6,000- 9,000 pages indexed in Google. Now there are 123 pages indexed. The decline did not happen all at once, it has been a slow decline of 3 months. This site has the most natural links pointing to it. Almost all the links that point to this site were created by others. It's strange that this site, that has the most link diversity, also has the least amount of pages indexed by Google. Any ideas?
I've had that happen many times to my sites, and it takes about a year before it goes back up again. You might even see a further drop yet, I had one site had 2000 indexed, then it dropped to 400, then 150... stayed there for a year, then went up to 3000 all of the sudden in one day and has stayed up now. it wasn't supplemental or anything either hope that helps you that you're not alone in that
Presume that your URL is yoursite.com. You can check if your site is penalized by following: 1. type site:yoursite.com in Google search box. If there are no indexed pages of your site, you are banned 2. type yoursite.com in Google search box. If your site is not #1 you have probably some kind of Google penalty/filter or your site is new and it almost doesn't have any backlinks. 3. type yoursite (without .com) in Google search box. If you are at #1 place you can be sure you don't have any penalties, but if you are not than maybe you have some small penalty or your site is still not very strong. Either way you need to work on your backlinks. If you want to be successful, your second milestone should be ranking #1 for yoursite without .com (first and the easiest milestone should be ranking #1 for yoursite.com). This just my opinion based on my experience. Just decreasing number of your site's indexed pages doesn't necessarily mean that you have a problem.