I started my site about a month ago, within a week I started ranking for a few keywords on google. Yesterday I received record hits from search results and then today I looked and I'm not listed for ANY keyword. Did I get sandboxed? How do I get out of the sandbox? What recommendations do you have.
NaSH123, Your not alone, this is a common problem that happens all the time, sometimes for the following reasons: 1. Your web-site is new 2. Your web-site is new and has aggressive Search Engine Optimisation 3. You have radically changed your web-site's text, title tags, meta tags etc recently. The best thing to do, is to check that you are not breaking any Search Engine Optimisation SPAM rules, like 'white text on a white background' as a crude example. New web-sites drop off all the time, as Google is unsure whether to trust them, and to see the reaction of what the designer will do to the site, when it drops off rankings. Best thing to do is be patient, don't radically change the content of your web-site or code. Simply continue as if it were still there, building natural incoming links, and continue to grow your web-site as required. SEO on new web-sites is all about patience. James.
It should come back after a few days or a week, this could be because your competitors might be more active with the keywords you're targeting or google is changing their algorithm more often.
Nothing to do with competitors. I went from page 1 to not even in the top 100 results. When I do site:URL it shows that 19 pages are indexed and thats roughly how big the site is. Maybe a few more pages.
Don't worry, this happens to new sites sometimes. Your site should back on Google soon. Just keep building links.
Yes it has been cached regularly. Should I continue to build links or should I pause? I was building 4-15 links on a daily basis for the site of course with a variation with the number of links trying to mimic a steady increase. I also added a keyword dense paragraph on the homepage whereas there was no text before maybe about 4 days ago.
to me there are two possible reasons: 1st: you have been black listed because you did something bad (bought links, doorway page, keywords stuffing etc...) 2nd: do you have a sitemap? Did you just upload it by any chance? If you do, get rid of it, and you will rank again. I've seen that many times when a site dropped in SE's results dramatically because of the sitemap. Don't know why exactly but getting rid of the sitemap solved it every time. Naturally crawability is the way to go.
The site had a sitemap since day one which is updated anytime a new page is created. I haven't done anything but build links from free resources, nothing paid. Site is still not ranking well on Google but doing fine on Yahoo.
dont panic. It happens at times. Just make sure that your pages still show when you search : site:domain.com As long as you see results after running this query, you are not banned from google.
Just like to let everyone know my ranking came back and I am ranking the same if not higher for some terms. Any idea what happened? Was google just doing some shuffling?