I had a site in 2nd position for over a year for a certain keyword. A few weeks ago my site completely dropped out of ranking for that keyword, but it still ranks for a few lesser ones. I've checked the competition and while there are a few more sites up there it makes no sense why I would stop ranking for that keyword. I did pay for a link for a month about 6 months ago but took it off and haven't done anything like that since. In fact I've been putting more social bookmark back links to the site. I've also been creating articles for ezine etc... but nothing I do seems to bring it back. I did notice that before it disappeared I shot up in ranking to #1 for a few days. This is on a blogspot blog. Is there any way to see if google is penalizing you? It's been about 12 days since my traffic disappeared.
well no there is no way to see if google has penalized some site i experienced same thing (call it penalty, sandbox or whatever) with one of my sites around 2-3 months back and after that i have been trying different things to get those rankings back but no luck yet the reason for it most of the times is some quick link building or if you are submitting links with same anchor text and that is my personal experience =)
I have a blogspot blog as well, and had a very strange experience today. I checked my stats about 5pm, and it said that I only had 13 visitors all day. My blog is a pr2 and I typically get about 100-150 visitors every day. Anyway, so I checked to make sure my blog was up, and it was. Then for some reason, I decided to check my pr, and I found it dropped to a 0! I couldn't believe it, so I checked in a few places, and it kept coming back as 0. Then I was down about it, and just left my computer for 90 minutes. When I came back after 90 minutes, I noticed my stats had gone up to almost 50 visitors. Then I checked my pr and it had changed back to pr2. I'm so happy it is back to normal, but confused about how that happened. In other words, I don't know, I guess just keep doing what your doing and the Google G-d may favor you once again.
This has happened to my site before too. I was ranked #2 for some random keyword and it suddenly disappeared out of the blue. But then it came back after 2 weeks? Weird =/
Its difficult to really know if you have penalized or not...best thing is to go back through and check all of your backlinks to see if a few have dropped off or dissaperared. Failing that, it may simply be that some of your inbound links have been discounted or devalued by G...you need to look at your overall linking profile. Cheers