Is my site penalized or sandboxed?

Hey people,

I own a site http://www.healthinsurancebluebook.com and have had a team of people doing SEO on it for over 8 months. Now we have made a rather dramatic progress and were ranking quite high for many high competitive keywords.

We took the first page for some minor longtail keywords in health insurance nihce and were ranking in position 12 for keywords "health insurance plans" about December 5th or so.

So after Dec 5th all our rankings have disappeared and have not rebounded yet to date. Usually we had tons of fluctuations in rankings before and it took at most one week for rankings to rebound.

So could anyone analyze or explain whether this is a penalty or this is just sandbox?

I am just lookibg for any educated opinions regarding this subject as frankly I am bit confused.

Is there any way to actually tell the difference between penalty and sandbox? And esentially should I get worried or not?

First thing you need to fix is your title tag. The MAX should be 70 characters including spaces....this is going to give you a big hit from the big G

Your description tag is also way too long and has some major keyword stuffing in it. "health insurance" FIVE time in your description!!! If you want any more help with your SEO pm me.

Actually not sandboxed or penalized. noticed today that nearly all rankings are back and some have improved. Will look into what you have posted above. Thanks.

Would be interested in more criticism on my site.

When this happens it quite worries me (when it's one of my own).
Because when this starts, google will now start dancing with your website. Will step on you sometimes, sometimes you step on her... But in many cases, she gets tired of dancing with you and will slap you like a bitch.

This is not what I say will happen to you.. This is just what happened to me.

Bross said:

When this happens it quite worries me (when it's one of my own).
Because when this starts, google will now start dancing with your website. Will step on you sometimes, sometimes you step on her... But in many cases, she gets tired of dancing with you and will slap you like a bitch.

This is not what I say will happen to you.. This is just what happened to me.

Click to expand...

I think under all circumstances we have to be extremely persistent here especially with mega competitive niches. Its all about that financial reward in the long run.

haha I use that template.. looks nice