[HELP!] Sandboxed or Google Dance!?!

Let me start by saying, I am relatively new to SEO - and any advice is helpful.

Back story - Site is about 3 months old, and for the last week or so I have been #4 on 22k local exact search term - very competitive. Then yesterday I was so excited to see my index join me at #5. So I had #4 .com/category/ and #5 .com

I want to say 5 hours later, I was doing daily search to manually record serps and I noticed some of my serps were gone, not thinking much I tried for the term I just checked earlier with both my links - only to find NOTHING.

I have build a small tier 1 around the site of web2.0(10 HQ) interlinked and then pushed ALN to the web 2.0s. This was working fantastic and I though it would be great as everyone is getting their money site slapped for linking that - which I had not done.

Still today -my web2.0 that link to my site are healthy, and 2 of them are on pages 2 and 3 of my search term that getting 22k local exact - where yesterday I had 2 links.

WTF happened in 5 hours!?

It wasnt only my serp where I was doing fantastic - it was a bulk of my terms --



I could really really use all the help I could get - this site was turning out to be a real winner for me and now look a week later I am going through this..

As you can imagine 80% of traffic has dropped and today traffic might be as low as my first week.

Conrad:dunce:

Could be a Panda slap.

Happened to me also 2 days ago, g00gle has done gone full retard.

talkmeow said:

Happened to me also 2 days ago, g00gle has done gone full retard.

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Have you noticed anything coming back - have you even started to take steps to recover?

Wait and see.. If you can't get back your keywords within 6-7 days, then it's a slap or else it's just a Google dance.

jr_sci said:

Wait and see.. If you can't get back your keywords within 6-7 days, then it's a slap or else it's just a Google dance.

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Yea, I know this is only the second day - I just hate when things are out of my hands completely I feel like I should be doing something, 5 minutes ago.

Panda hit you with his panda stick pakpakpak! If only few keywords have dropped their rankings that would be a Google Dance. If majority of your keywords dropped their rankings yet your site site:www[dot]mydomain[dot]com is still indexed that is the effect of Google Panda.. If majority of your keywords dropped their rankings and your site is also not indexed on Google that would mean you're sandboxed.

conrad said:

Yea, I know this is only the second day - I just hate when things are out of my hands completely I feel like I should be doing something, 5 minutes ago.

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The best possible thing you can do when you see such a dance is to add 2-3 quality articles. Sometimes it acts like an insurance but not always.

jvmartija said:

Panda hit you with his panda stick pakpakpak! If only few keywords have dropped their rankings that would be a Google Dance. If majority of your keywords dropped their rankings yet your site site:www[dot]mydomain[dot]com is still indexed that is the effect of Google Panda.. If majority of your keywords dropped their rankings and your site is also not indexed on Google that would mean you're sandboxed.

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ahh ha. Sounds like panda :/ site:domain is still showing everything indexed, and yes this was clearly a majority of my keywords. Ouch. *bamboo stick has made contact*

jr_sci said:

The best possible thing you can do when you see such a dance is to add 2-3 quality articles. Sometimes it acts like an insurance but not always.

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Yes already on it, and also trying to contact some webmasters to get some blog posts. Anyone have any suggestions for guest blogging on true authority sites other than google "write for us" (currently doing this, but responses are slim and dragged out)

Sorry for the offtop but what software\site you're using to track your positions? Thanks

conrad said:

Have you noticed anything coming back - have you even started to take steps to recover?

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Yes i did. I got back and my position was for a few spots better
So if you have a good content and all by "rules' you should expect the same.

same problem here - 6 x web 2 pointing to my money site (blast them with amr on daily basis). I will add few articles and see the results..... Can u give me some tips ?

crashus said:

Sorry for the offtop but what software\site you're using to track your positions? Thanks

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sescout . com
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Just a little update - maybe can help tell me whats going on...

Ranking is back for main keyword which was previously on page 1 - Its on page 10 and its a .com/category/keyword - completely different keyword which is ranking for it.

So 2 days ago it was .com/category/keyword1

and now its .com/category/keyword2

ranking for keyword 1

What do you guys think?

I believe it's the google dance. The reason they dance is to discourage you from adding more backlinks and prevent you from building links "manually". It instills a sense of "shit i'm doing this all wrong" attitude and scares you into stopping your SEO campaign.

If you add more backlinks and strengthen existing ones, I'm almost certain your rankings will come back even stronger than before.

It's the name of the game!

szhang said:

I believe it's the google dance. The reason they dance is to discourage you from adding more backlinks and prevent you from building links "manually". It instills a sense of "shit i'm doing this all wrong" attitude and scares you into stopping your SEO campaign.

If you add more backlinks and strengthen existing ones, I'm almost certain your rankings will come back even stronger than before.

It's the name of the game!

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Appreciate the hope, but idk some more news for you guys..

site:domain.com/category/keyword1 (which was ranking 1st page is now not coming up)

but site:domain/keyword1 - which links to the same page is coming up

shit is draining.

Hey, not sure if this will help you, but I lost about 20% traffic off one my my sites since the last update.

My own personal experiments sites seemed to imply that you can gain some of this back by doing simple things like reducing the number of adverts above fold, updating your privacy policy (and ensuring it mentions google), tweaking your about us page etc. Obviously this is in addition to adding fresh content from time to time

I haven't gained all my traffic back as yet, but it's definitely had a positive effect.

0_inspiration said:

Hey, not sure if this will help you, but I lost about 20% traffic off one my my sites since the last update.

My own personal experiments sites seemed to imply that you can gain some of this back by doing simple things like reducing the number of adverts above fold, updating your privacy policy (and ensuring it mentions google), tweaking your about us page etc. Obviously this is in addition to adding fresh content from time to time

I haven't gained all my traffic back as yet, but it's definitely had a positive effect.

Click to expand...

Thanks! Yes I will work on updating about us - thanks for all advice any is welcomed!

One of my sites shot up in google from 80 a day to 500 for nearly three days, then dropped back to 20 average for a month now it is hitting 2-300 a day for over a month now

Very odd