Your right and wrong. As I just said above Google updates, discredits and/or gives more credit to different factors as well as adding more so that effects changes in rankings but you can keep that from happening by keeping up with your site and keep building good quality links.
Gabriel, google hates sidebars on the right! just kidding Anyways, I was hit last june but then after I am OK. My belief: the reason behind this is the quality of links. I got rid of all non quality links and kept very few valuable ones. Hope this sticks, and I am confident
well i have a site that just recently was released from the 'sandbox' effect. for about a week it started ranking ok for some more competitive terms, so it was cool. it doesn't have a great number of links pointing to it, no blackhat, fairly unique content (it has a directory as a main feature, so there is duplicate content in places). it's also about 9 months old, and is currently pr7. it then got google slapped around the 7th and started to rank worse than ever. searching for the domain name in google places it at position 6 of 6 total results. things didn't look too good. i left it to see what would happen, and a few days later it returned across the datacenters. "good" i thought, so i continuted to just leave it untouched. 2 days ago it happened again, just in time for the weekend (same as before). last time, the results returned on the monday morning, so i'm interested to see if that happens again.
Yeah I'm still under that 1 year mark and get at least one link per day (usually link from sites that are page rank 3 to 6). I try not to spend too much time on link building each day, because that sudden jump will give me a penalty. I try to make sure they have related material to my site, but if a white hat site with high page rank links to me without having to return the favor, then I'm not gonna turn them down. Although I do have an affiliate program, so I guess it does give them the possibility of benefiting from the link. As far as moving my side bar to the right ... it does help SEO a bit, but a big part of it was being unique. I want to be unique without being totally off the wall. My link building is catching on ... Google is still doing whatever it's doing, but other search engines are taking more notice (more love from yahoo, altavista, and MSN or Live). Constantly trying to make sure that I don't do anything that could be considered black hat now or in the future. I'm in for the long haul.
Well I made the change to my site a day after the standard shipping cut off for X mas, so my sales were declining anyways. I wanted to make sure to get the changes in before New Years, because I'm sure Google will have some kind of update in January (back links/or page rank). Sales do continue at the same rate as before my traffic drop, just hoping for some more love from search engines in 2007.