Several sites disappeared from SERPs, but still indexed?

Within the last month or so I've had several sites that were ranking on the first page for their main keyword just disappear from the SERPs. I am not able to find these sites even when searching past page 15 of the SERPs. These sites are about 1.5 years old and have unique content (5 pages of unique content on each).

When I do a "site:mydomain" they do show up in the index (homepage and all the pages). For one of the sites 1 did a 2500 Profile Pyramid link package about 1 month ago. The other site no other backlinking except for blog comments done about 4 months ago.

So what exactly has happened to these sites? Are they sandboxed or what? Should I just build more links, add more content, or both?

add more content, build more links, maybe start more sites and do things a bit differently.

also 5 pages doesn't make a quality site.

Since the Google "Panda" update a lot has changed.

Google has moved the playing field and simple text links are almost counter productive, Pyramid linkbuilding is no longer worth the effort but Contextural Links will get you an almost immediate SERPS improvement.

Most of the backlinks you will be offered today will be either, simple text on blog profiles or blog comments.

Tens of thousands of both can be done in 24hrs using Scrapebox, and because of that Google is now giving simple text links less weight in SERPS.

If you watch the latest video by Matt Cutts, Google's own guru, you will learn that contextural backlinks now have the most value.

Contextural backlinks are links placed inside an article or blog post that are in the context of their surrounding text, so they look natural.

For example an article on firefighting might have links to a firestation URL. These are quite time consuming to create and invariably need an image to get maximum Google juice.

For anyone planning to create backlinks I recommend you to take 3 minutes to watch the Matt Cutts video on http://autoseosystem.com

If you recognise the change he speaks about. then afterwards use their FREE software to create some contextural articles embedded with your own URL.

If the sites are important for you then this is the time to invest. In fresh content and in quality backlinks! Good luck.

Sounds like a Panda victim.

BHopkins said:

Sounds like a Panda victim.

Click to expand...

So where are these sites anyways if they are still indexed? Some supplemental index or something? But I have other sites that are more than 15 pages of content drop to the pages 5 and 6 that are 4 years old and ranking on 1st page for last 2.5 years (many times in the top 3). I didn't do any sort of recent backlinking to those.

So the Panda update focuses on sites that have less content only or if you do have content, but had built backlinks from forum profiles and blog comments then your site took a hit? But then I have a few sites with just 1 page of content still ranking at #2 spot for their keyword and haven't touched it for almost a year. Just weird of what sites get hit and which ones do not.

I've had the same thing happen to a few of my sites recently too. I'm losing a lot more than before since this whole Panda update.

I'm honestly not sure what the hell is triggering it. I have sites that are still sitting stable at the top of the search engines and those have "spammy" links built to them like profiles and blog comments, and they don't have a whole lot of content. So I'm not sure what Google is seeing differently in the ones they left alone and the ones they knocked way down the rankings.

Add more fresh content and keep building links try and find some good ede and gov links.