My site which almost completely desappeared from the Google SERPS on March 22 is back [April 18] after 4 weeks of hopes and prayers. The full story (google only): -I created a classified ads site on october 2006 -after adding some links on good directories and forums, my site got good rankings on less competitive Keywords. -After two months, i was on the first page for my main keywords. -Then I had a short stay on the google sandbox (december), when I was back I tought I'll never leave the first page...lol -March 22 site drops from (3<=>10) to 1000-(3<=>10) assuming you show the supplemental results -I lost 3/4 of my visitors! -After re-checking my website... no black hat -April 16 I created a sitemap and added it to the google webmaster tool -Two days after, My site was back to normal I would be very interested in reading stories of big and long google ranking drops I would like to ask experienced webmasters if the sitemap has something to do with my site coming back from death. Thanks
I have been struggling with this lately too.. I recieved 450 uniques in one day from google ... actually like 3 days straight... Then, I dropped to like 10-15 for 5 days straight. No changes during that time. Normally I am #1 or 2 for most "{insert university abbreviation here} apartments" keywords.
I have a new site too (November 2006). I had a very brief sandbox effect because I bought my domain name for 10 years. Google did index me quickly, but I was in supplemental (mostly). As soon as I started submitting sitemaps to Google within a week I was out of the supplemental. I would suggest to anybody to submit sitemaps. If you have a site with many deep pages it'll take forever for Google to deep crawl you otherwise.