My site captainwatercolor dot com is a collection of watercolor lessons on video. It ranks well for most of its search terms. It also comes up in the image search. Considering that is a pretty new site, its doing A OK. Until a few days ago the site had fabulous results in the google video search. Three lessons in the top ten, seven in the top 100, it was the default video in the upper right, and best of all, the video thumbnail came up all over the web search area. The site was even in the main sources, ("search only from these sites") Suddenly its not there at all. It does not even return video results for the site name. Nevertheless, its kept its ranking in the main search. There is an xml sitemap and a video sitemap and they verify with webmaster tools. The webmaster tools even shows sitelinks. This happened about the time I put up a new lesson, but its not much different than any other lesson. Any idea what might be happening. Is there any good source of information regarding optimizing video sites.
Hi Larry, Sounds like you've hit the Google sandbox. Seems to happen to most. You get high rankings when new and then disappear for a few months while they suss you out. In my opinion, not much you can doo about it. You've submitted the sitemap etc so doing the right things. Cheers, Sam
Thanks for the answer samwinport. Google first indexed this site in April, 1908 which makes it 18 months old in their eyes. The site was registered a few months before that. Do you still think its the sandbox effect?