Wasn't sure whether to put this in White Hat SEO or not, but here goes anyway. I've been SEOing the shit out of a landing page.. The basics really, nothing too over the top and mostly regarded as white hat.

Y! Answers, Blog Posting, Video Posting, Article Submitting and the like. Absolutely no spam. All content I posted had "value".

Seems my site has been banned from the big G. Can anyone possibly enlighten me as to how this is done on Googles end? Is this an automated process?

Anyway, It's a damn shame because I was raking it in, with 6 or 7 good keywords in the top three. Plus a good 10 hours work. out the window. Oh well, no one to blame but myself. I'm pretty pissed.

This leads me to my next question.. How is one to avoid this in the future?

/End Rant/QQ

its hard to know unless we see the site

Maybe it just got sandboxed. You can always write them and even if you got banned, you can get unbanned Hit them up and see what's going on.

Has it been de-indexed or just lost it's place in the rankings?

That's it.. sandboxed. I wasn't too keen on the terminology.. Is that sarcasm about contacting google and asking them? Cause I can't imagine them actually doing anything about it, at least not any time soon..

Thanks..

How old is your site? Google tends to drop off sites that are new temporarily. Doesn't always mean that you're banned.

Well, it doesn't seem to be completely de-indexed as I can actually pull up the page by typing it in. I can tell though from my limited experience in SEO, that a page doesn't stick around at the top results for 4 weeks and suddenly fall of the face of google.

It does. Any minor change in the alogrithm is sufficient. That's what blackhat is for. If you are anyways gonna drop in rankings, you might as well make some money while you are at the top.

Well if it's not completely deindexed than it got sandboxed and it might come back strong.

And no I wasn't sarcastic about it. A few of my sites got banned because I was doing bh but wrote them a letter and bam it got unbanned. It doesn't work every time though. Good luck.

Well shoot. I've owned nearly a hundred sites; this being the first to ever have this happen. Not a bad track record but..really, how sad. Incridible how my site dropped and all the competitors remain unscathed.

I don't know, Boomer. Seems awfully strange to me, with the way this randomly transpired without anyone else seeming to be affected, that it would be a change of algorithm. But i think I'll take your word for it.. I have no better explanation

No wonder so many webmasters go BH.

It does, for me 3 times in 3 months. (and not just 1 site)

From result 4 on Google to nowhere, 3 times in 3 months, domain registered in April, don't worry, it will come back.

White hat SEO the shit out of it, write your articles, build your backlinks, do your stuff, then stuff every visitor.

My advice if Big Brother throw you out of their index, you can contact them over Google Webmaster Tools and say something like you hired an SEO Agency who did something wrong bla bla bla and maybe they will reindex you, thats how it was with one of my sites....