I created http://www.completebathroomssuffolk.co.uk/ a couple of months ago; it is not over-optimised and I have not done any linkbuilding (it has only 20 forum signature links from 2 forums which I used to get the site indexed to start with and then later to get inner pages indexed). However, the site has now dropped from no 9 for "bathrooms bury st edmunds" to some back page out of sight. As I haven't over optimised nor created any spammy or illegal links - has anyone any ideas why this happened? The only thing I can think of is that I created a holding page whilst I was busy doing other work - do the search engines get upset at you creating holding pages? I have never heard of this but can think of no reason why site has suddenly dropped like this. Other customer sites I do fare OK - the only time a site dropped like this before was when I was learning about linkbuilding and experimenting and I overdid it - but with this site I haven't done any linkbuildign at all.
Have you done any other link building since then? This is part of the Google dance once you do build some initial links. This is part of the SEO process. Expect this to happen every now and then. The biggest piece of advice I can offer for you is to get some high PR contextual backlinks from inner pages (such as placing a do-follow blog comment on other sites).
No - I'm a web designer not a seo and so I usually leave the site with the initial forum signature links; occasionally I add a couple of directories or sb just to "go the extra mile". It's never caused a problem before. Would a few ezine articles get the site out of the sandbox or is it just a waiting game? I take it there's no reason for a holding page to trigger sandbox - I'd like to double check this before offering this to another customer.