I've got a site thats 35 days old in a competitive health related niche. The traffic from google was steadily growing for longtail keywords over the first 2 weeks, then traffic tanked to nothing ever since. Google immediately indexes each new post after being pinged, but ever since day 14 my internal pages are no where to be found for their long tail keywords. It's weird, when I search for the longtail keyword in quotes, they rank, but no quotes and they are no where to be found. Any thoughts? I've never experienced a sandbox with longtail before.
very possible it's a sandbox. so long as your site is still indexed, just keep building links and eventually you will come out. be more careful with other sites in the future, and be very aware of how many links you are building, and how fast you are building them. could also be the 'dance' and your rankings will slide up to the top very quickly. another problem could be competition. exact phrasing is not the only key to ranking. authority can very easily overpower. for example, if no one had a page about 'best search engine', it wouldn't matter if you did or not, because the top serach engines have more authority for searches surrounding search engines.