Hey guys. So I'm thinking this is normal but really need some piece of mind. I started a site about 5 months back. It has about 850-900 backlinks and has a PR. I was hitting high ranks (1-5) on many targeted longtail keywords. About 7 days ago I lost all of my rankings yet many of my backlinks (even with my site name in the title of some) are still hitting high rankings. What gives!? Am I being penalized? I know I am still indexed.
I think your being penalized by Google because you probably did something wrong. You could probably fix it with a bit of work though
PR is the same. Hopefully most of that you guys are saying is true, I just hope i'm not waiting for months....
this usually happens just before or just after an update. The last PR update was around the 28th April so that could explain it. Alternatively it could be that you have been building backlinks too quickly, although this is virtually impossible to discover. Just keep building backlinks and adding content and within a few weeks it is likely that your ranking will recover. Also bear in mind that new sites often get a bounce in search engines which expires after around 6 months. I don't know why but i have found this happend with all my sites
As ur site is quite new, it might hav just faced the 'dreaded sandbox' effect. New websites often get a temporary 'free pass' and get rankings much easier than they should hav had otherwise. But after some time they suddenly lose all of those rankings and gets thrown back in the rankings. So you just need to build some quality backlinks from few credible sources. Also some unique content will help u get out of it.
@raidz I also started with my first blog 5 months ago and exactly same thing happening with my site. I have discussed this issue with google employees and top contributors from Google Forum and they told me, So, I stopped worrying about it and focusing on adding quality content and relevant backlinks. But my problem is even worse since google is not indexing my new posts anymore.