Website got dropped from Google for certain keywords

Hello all!

I've got keyword reporting going with SEO Dashboard and it appears our site has been dropped for about 5 keywords we were indexed with on Google. One of the keywords we had ranked about #12. We've started outsourcing some things out for our keywords for forum posting, blog posting, and directory listing.

This is what we've outsourced so far.

1500 manual directory submissions (maybe not manual, but that's what it was listed as)

100 forum posts

blog posting


Could this have hurt our ranking? Or could this be the Google "sandbox"?. I mean, if this did hurt our ranking, what says people couldn't just take ALL of their competitors keywords and spam them?

Thanks,

Joe

sandbox is a temporary effect, so adding links to competitors is just stupid, they might drop for awhile but then come up on top.
and i seriously doubt anyone would do 1500 manual submissions... that is probably why you got the penalty.

Yeah it's just doing the dance. I think the harder you make more backlinks the longer it will stay in the sandbox but when it comes out it will come out stronger. Just don't stop making backlinks.

Thanks guys.