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In the evening, I finally got around the fact that something had happened to my site and I had no idea what. So, I went to the internet and did a little research, read some articles. I came to a few conclusions which could have happened or was responsible for my lowering my site rankings in the search engine pages.
Possible Causes :
1> The site was down and googlebot crawlers came to crawl my site and they returned unhappily, thus, lowering my rankings.
2> Google Everflux
3> Google Dance (sometimes called Google Sandbox)
Possible Solutions :
Google Dance explained :
How to get out of Google Sandbox ?
If a site enters a sandbox, there are virtually no way of getting out. But one can take measures to reduce the site's time in the sandbox.
1> Increasing the rate of posting on the site ( at 5 articles per week ).
2> Start marketing the content on social media websites like Facebook , Google+ and Twitter. More the people repost your article the better.
3> Commenting on high PR blogs and forums to keep the backlinks coming.
4> Avoid "Black-Hat" SEO Techniques and only use "White-Hat" Techniques.
In my case, I don't know how long it will take to get my site out of the sandbox but I will be following the above steps carefully. Hopefully, one day I will eventually come out.
Two days ago, when I used a long tail keyword to find out whether a particular post of mine had moved up on the SERP, I couldn't find it. I went to the 2nd page, then the 3rd page, then the 4th page , but no luck. It wouldn't even appear after 100 search results. Then I used my other long tail keywords to find some of the well ranked posts of mine. Same thing had happened to my every post. All of them had an average position of 4th or 5th position. I was devastated, stunned , angry , unhappy all at the same time. I turned off my computer and watched TV whole day.
If the website was down :
If the site was down, then the webmaster should have no problem in regaining their rankings, as when the googlebot crawlers or spiders come to crawl the site after it is online again, then the rankings should go up again.
Google Everflux explained :
Google has two types of spiders or crawlers. One crawler can be described as the parent crawler and the second can be regarded as the child crawler. The parent crawler is the main Google Database which contains everything. The child crawler is always hungry for new content. So, if you have a new website with fresh content it may be pushed towards the top of search rankings for a few weeks and as soon as the child crawler finds more fresh contents then your content becomes old and takes a backseat and goes way down the search rankings. But, webmasters need not worry as the parent crawler should return to your site eventually, thus , helping in returning you to your higher rankings. This phenomenon is known as Google Everflux.
Google Dance is when your site jumps around in the search engines. For example, my site had 4th and 5th positions for some of my long tail keywords and now they are not even in the top 100. This occurs due to algorithm changes in the Google Search Engines which takes into account 100+ factors to determine a site's rank in the search engines. The most important factor most would agree is how webmasters build backlinks to their site. For example, if a new website starts off with 300 backlinks, then Google is bound to get suspicious and put your site in a sandbox. In a sandbox, your site will be indexed and will be present in the Google's directory but you will be ranked very low in the search engines. From what I read, google normally keeps a site in the sand box for an average 6 months. Though the time frame depends on the website itself and its the keywords. The more competitive the keywords of a site are more time that site will stay in the sandbox.
