I am..in shock..about 2 weeks ago I was holding strong #1 spots for about 4 major keyphrases in Google and noticed my traffic slowly descreasing..Now I am noticing I'm not in the top pageS at all for all 4 keyphrases! I haven't really done any changes on my site other than change one of my adsense adds to an amazon add..and yet i've dropped dramatically... Does this mean i'm in the sandbox?? Any ideas on what could have caused this to happen and what I might need to do to get back up there? I mean, my site didn't just drop, it straight disappeared!...any help would be GREATLY appriciated
"What caused this to happen?" Google. If you've been knocked out of the SERPS you should check to see who has replaced you. Are they spam sites, cloaked, high trust rank, etc? I'm seeing the same results for a lot of established (old domain) sites being booted from G's page 1 for competitive keywords. Just my opinion, but it looks like G has placed even more emphasis on one-way links and anchor text. Probably way too much emphasis.
we have noticed on a french forum this phenomenon : some old sites (more than 3 years) suddenly disappear from SERP (I just have known that for one of my sites) maybe one or two months later, you come back and you are better placed than before the disappearance ! The reason why ? Nobody knows.
It can be SandBOX Effect . Or Your competitor doing more SEO work than you . Analyse the Search Results you will certainly get what's odd there .
You're not alone. Thousands of people have same problems, and most of them stayed without any revenue overnight. I am one of them ( 80-90 % less ) Thread about it : http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=204463 Google has f..ed up something again. Now we can just hope that it will be fixed soon, otherwise I really dont know where to find drugs that will keep my moral as high to continue this job.
Glad to see im not the only one..The interesting thing in my position is, my site is new..like..BRAND new..This site in perticular is not even a month old..I got some good links pointing to it, did a little optimization, and in no time made the first page. There isn't much competition in the field although it does get alot of searches..My domain is right on target with the keyphrases and the current people on the main page are crap..absolute crap! Other than about the top 4 spots the rest do not even have the keyphrase in their domain and do not look very well optimized for the keyword..They look more like news pages that mention the keyphrases maybe 2 or 3 times....very very odd!
Well since your site is new it could be the sandbox. As for the news pages out ranking you, I'm guessing that's due to backlinks. And since those news pages contain your keyphrases they're gonna always outrank you until you get more relevant backlinks (anchor text). And remember, someone else's SEO is not "crap" if it's feeding google what it wants. You should analyze their SEO and use it for yourself.