Is it possible I got sandboxed for this? I was 5th or 6th in the rankings after just a few hours, but have now disappeared without a trace - I am not ANYWHERE in the results. Is this the regular sandbox effect, or have Google taken offence to my use of their tradename? It's only a fun blog, and hosted on the Google-owned Blogspot, I might add!
I was 5th or 6th for the phrase "fridge-Googling". It's no big deal, the blog is only for fun, but I just wonder whether there is a principle at work here. I think one reason I might have shot up the rankings so quickly was that Blogspot is Google-owned and thus probably well-indexed, and regularly. The sudden disappearance is more fishy...
Right, I can go along with all that - I also understood this to be a symptom of the sandbox effect. Thought it was a bit strange that I had completely disappeared from the SERPs though...? Don't remember that happening for a previous site. So you reckon it's not censorship on Google's part, protecting their trademark...? Probably not, I guess. The Word Spy entry for the term that they supposedly served a Cease and Desist on is still first in the rankings!
In my experience you can disappear completely from the SERPs for competitive keywords and/or over optimisation for these. I created a website more than two years ago with the main keywords in the domain name, e.g. Keyword1-keyword2.co.uk and it has only started to rank for this term in the last couple of months. The site itself was sandboxed and could only be found for obscure searches for three or more word phrases. After about one year and a crank back on the OO it started to pick up crumbs for some competitive terms but not the domain name. Recently the domain name has sprung out and today it is number three in the UK SERPs and number 29 in .com.