Let me start off by saying that to my knowledge, I have done nothing that would warrant a punishment of my page by google. The only linkbuilding methods I have used so far are directory submissions, forum posts with sigs, and blog post replies. i have never paid for any links, nor have i done any link exchanging. Before I left my office for my holiday break, I used to do regular keyword searches for my company's website (which I designed and am attempting to do the SEO for) and it was starting to do better and better for certain keywords I had targeted. Now I've come back from vacation and when I do searches for the same words, my SERP's are way different. My homepage will not come up for searches like it used to. if i do site:mysite.com, it still shows my homepage, but if i just search for "pmi-fl" which used to show my homepage as #1, now my homepage does not come up in the search. It also doesn't come up in searches for other terms I optimized it for anymore... What could have happened? Should I not worry and assume it will bounce back in the next few days? Any advice would be appreciated.
If your site is new, Google will often start to give you good rankings, then drop you back. In my experience you usually just have work your way back up. Also, all of the search engines have constant fluctuations, so it's not uncommon to move around a bit.
k, maybe i didnt make my first post clear enough. the domain is 8 months old. ive been doing keyword rank tracking for the past month and a half or so for a total of about 10 targeted keywords. for the past month, they have all been slowly moving upwards in the SERPs. some moved to the first page within a few weeks and HAD stayed there. up until 12/17/2007 the ranking consistency for these words was pretty predictable. i got back from my vacation, and all of the rankings look the same for all of my INNER pages. HOWEVER, my homepage has TOTALLY dropped off in the SERPs. only my homepage, no other page. why would this happen? if i was being penalized, my entire site would have dropped in the SERPs, not just my homepage, correct? furthermore, this is bad because my homepage usually pulls most of the good SERP rankings for the keywords im after. the inner pages have good SERPs for keywords of lesser importance to me.
nevermind. i just received a PM from someone helping me to realize that apparently im either very tired or blind and my homepage did still show up in the SERP's, just a lot lower than im used to seeing it. guess you guys are right and itll bounce back.
try to keep track of how many of your pages google has indexed, specifically how many of your pages are out of the supplemental results. do this by searching for site:mysite.com/* if your number of indexed pages plunges, so will your rankings in the serps. so at least you'll know part of the reason why you dropped. nick p.s. by the way, blatant off-topic plug, check out the resource in my sig, it should help your seo efforts.
Sometimes you don't see your site on it's original rankings because of accessing different data center. But sooner or later you will see your real rankings.