Yesterday I had about 1000 uniques (all from Google, youtube and yahoo answers) on my site I launched about 2 weeks ago. Most of the Google results were from long tail keywords where I usually appeared on (end of) first/ second page. However, for my main keyword "Hannah Montana" I was on 4th page yesterday. When I checked my SERPs today, my site is NOWHERE to be found when I search for the main keyword and I have also lost rankings with the other long tail keywords. Overall, I only got 100 uniques today . Now, I haven't been doing any blackhat. In yahoo I have 88 backlinks at the moment which were all built gradually, most of them coming from comments and directories, which is true. I have also submitted 5 videos to youtube with my link in description and a few yahoo answers (about 10 in all). Not bought any links. Are these those damn sandbox symptoms ? All my content is unique (except for the song lyrics which I have modified as far as I could). I've been trying to get some reciprocal link exchanges over the past week but haven't had any luck yet. How long do people think it will take to get my SERPs back? I'm very disappointed in this, just when the site was starting to catch on. Oh, and I also have 237 pages in my sitemaps of which 20 indexed according to google webmaster but there are about 36 when I do a site: search.
Didn't sell any links. I think the age may be the problem - it's only 2-3 weeks old but it was doing really well!
Can happen to new sites but is a good indicator of where it will be if you start getting some links, might take longer than 4 to 5 days though, happened to mine once and took 3 weeks to come back, but with all the new content it came back with even more traffic.
Well, I hope it doesn't take 3 weeks - that number seems to unreasonable.. why on earth would it take three weeks for a good, well SEO website to rank for its keywords well .
I am sorry - but I must share my experience with you. Way back- at the end of October I had few hundred visitors from Google for long-tail keywords for which I was ranking between 1-20. 2 days later - my site was not even ranking for its official name (domain without TLD) It has not yet come back. And just one good news for you-- I did sell link on that site.
Well, patience is the only thing you need IMHO. A 2-3 week-old website is simply not established enough to see consistent rankings. Keep doing what you are doing and build good content. ~tasty
It's common for new sites to immediately rank well for a week or two and then drop completely out of the rankings. It really depends on the keyword, but it can take 6 months or more for rankings to return.
same happened to me a couple of days in the past but the next day i was on the track again ... dont know quite well why, but it was very strange... wait a few days, it will be back on track... but if your site is new..dont worry about that kinda stuph... worry about your content, make sure its big and relevant... results will sure come on the way good luck
Very True. It is not uncommon to see new site losing its ranking for a couple of months for no reason (sandbox?). As long as you keep updating your blog with unique content and building links, you should do well not only to your long tail kw, but also some competitive kws.