I was placing very well on page one of google for a couple of years now for many of my keywords. www(dot)vamoosevarmint(dot)com. Now my homepage does not even show on searches at all, even when copying text from the page! I think this is why it happen but need to make sure from some of you folks who might have done this. I made some changes on my web site and added a bunch of the counties in the state of Michigan and did not bother to count the word "county". The pages that had i think too many word of county on them was the contact page that came up to around 15% of the time and 8% of the time on the home page. I wasn't even paying attention to this and I think it got me, its not even one of my major keywords. I think this was my issue and have changed this thinking this was the problem. Is it possible that Google sand boxed my home page after being online for 4 years. The possible problem word has been brought down to about 3% now and I am hoping this was the problem. Does this sound correct or is there possible something else that I am not seeing. I don't think it was with link building cause I have only generated 300 in the last month. I don't think it was the addition of 40 county pages they are similar but not duplicate. So the only thing I can think of is the way google looked at my oops as possible spam with the word county.? Being that this is changed how long will it take to get backinto the rat race. Thanks for looking
Your site isn't sandboxed, that refers to new websites that automaticaly get pushed deep in the rankings shortly after launching their site. Your website is likely penalized. It isn't banned as it comes up for a site: search. Sometimes when you make drastic changes on a page, you temporarily lose rankings for that page as Google re-evaluates it. Basically Google doesn't want to give sites good rankings when they might've been hacked or taken over by someone else. Luckily for you, these penalties are usually just temporary. In time your rankings should come back. So be patient and keep building more backlinks. It may have been caused by the overuse of the word 'county', but I doubt it. There are sites that have much higher keyword density and still rank well.
I am signed up to the google tools, it says that there is something wrong with two pages in the sitemaps, I did not find the errors and the links were good. So i don't think that was the problem. So maybe adding all the new pages could have made it penalized. When you say drastic changes does that mean with the whole site or just the home page or a combination. I did not think I made drastic changes on the home page. I have been adding a couple new items every other week to keep content fresh. Is this too often.
I don't think site is penalized. I can find your site when I search for your domain name 'vamoosevarmint'. You may have lost ranking (which is not unusual).
If i do a drag and drop on the text of the home page it will not come up. Its like the home page is not indexed even though it is. So I just cant figure out why when I have been on top of google for the last 3 years. Now I cant even find it anywhere on any of the keywords I used to hit on.
Well those who have posted. I am out and running again. What ever Google did I am out of it. I did some minor changes and removed some of the counties that I thought was a bit over written and now I am up and on top again. So for those that posted I am greatly appreciative of the input. I didn’t sleep well for the past few nights but now I will sleep better.