My kids cake site was started about 7 months ago. I had the first few weeks high in the Google SERPs (the honeymoon period) and then dropped way down as I expected. I have spent the past 6 months adding content and building backlinks to get out of the sandbox and about 2 months ago I came back high in the SERPs appearing on page 1 for many keyword terms including some great, competitive 2 word terms. My organic traffic soared and I was up to over 500 UV per day. It's been like this consistently for the past 2 months. Now today all of a sudden my site has completely disappeared from the SERPs in Google (I can only find it by typing in my site address). I don't believe I've been banned since my pages are still indexed and I still appear for my site name. Have I been sandboxed or penalized in some way? I hope to goodness that this is just temporary. I know that some people disappear and then reappear just a short time later. I hope that's me too because I've worked really hard on this and haven't done anything black hat that I know of. If you have any ideas then please let me know - otherwise I guess I just have to remain patient and keep building links and adding more content. This just sucks as my site was earning $10-30 per day on the affiliate side plus some AdSense income. Thanks everyone!
Does your site have a balanced link profile? http://www.sea-waves.net/blog/the-value-of-a-balanced-link-profile/
Just last weekend I changed the name of my site and I got bumped down to the 6th page from the first. I got really worried but it only lasted a few days. Then throughout the week I have been being tossed between the 1st and 2nd pages and sometimes disappearing alltogether. Today I moved up higher then every before for my main keyword. I think that G is just "dancing" and you will probably be back where you were before very soon.
Thanks - I do seem to be back already for some of the less competitive terms so I hope this is just a reshuffle and that I'll be back soon for the high traffic terms also.
The more balanced the site's link profile, the less impact algorithm changes and filters will have. Most likely Google will tweak the algorithm back and your site will recover.
Wow - site is back already. Thank goodness! I probably never would have noticed if it hadn't been a Sunday which is when I often work on my sites. Although I did lose a lot of traffic for a number of hours so today will be a slower day overall (at least I know why).
A lot of the algorithm tweaks are done at night or over the weekend. Analyze the sites that have stable rankings to help you determine the cause of your sites drop in the rankings. So that you can improve optimize that area better.
Unless your site is very well established you will notice these temporary shift in rankings all the time. Very nice site by the way!
Bogart has given you some good feedback... A diverse backlink profile will help reduce the likelihood that you take a big hit to rankings when they change their algorithm. Glad to see you're back. Just curious... Did your traffic drop off drastically? Or did traffic stay pretty much the same as before, but you couldn't find your URLs for certain keywords? The reason I ask is that sometimes Google will pick one or more of their data centers to test out new algo changes... Could be that you were just seeing one of those test scenarios but most of their data centers still had you ranked normally.
I'm beginning to realize that. My main competitors have sites that have been around for 5+ years so they're much more established than me. And thanks for the compliment on my site. It's starting to do well from an income perspective and it's a passion of mine so I actually love working on it.
Take this as constructive criticism, but after reviewing the content I would think Google may feel you are a "thin affiliate" site. In other words, very little content with many affiliate links. I would work on adding more useful content and hiding those affiliate links.
Thanks for the great suggestion and it surely is a surprise that I did not think on these lines earlier... As far as OP's concern goes, the hard work hardly goes unrewarded and I am glad that you got your well earned serps back! Regards, RightMan
You also might thing about using a 301 redirect on your index page to avoid dup content you also need lots more links most of your incoming links are nofollow, find more dofollow links.
Constructive criticism is always welcomed and you have actually brought up something that is a constant fear of mine I am working to always add more text content and will continue to do so. I plan to build out the recipes and cake tips pages more to add more content and will also add more party ideas to the individual cake and party theme pages as well as some instructions to the cake photo pages. One question, does hiding the affiliate links (which I know I can do via CJ) really make a difference in the way Google views those links?