How do I know if I have been penalized?

[jdwanchalk]

I have a site with the domain keywordkeywordkeyword.net

I was ranking about 6th, page one, for the search "keyword keyword keyword" and was bottom page one/top page two for the search "keyword keyword."

The site itself is about 3.5 months old. It has ranked this way for at least 1.5 months.

Now, the other day I lost ALL major rankings for this domain. I still, however, can get long tails and the PR bars are not gray, the pages are still indexed, etc.

What is likely to be going on?

[MJ]

Welcome to the sandbox, see ya in three months.

Were you linkbuilding "fast"?

[jdwanchalk]

Welcome to the sandbox, see ya in three months.

Were you linkbuilding "fast"?

No, I actually only built a few links total.

[Randy Ray]

Did you use the same anchor text for all of those links you built?

[jdwanchalk]

Did you use the same anchor text for all of those links you built?

Nope. It was actually just a few, literally three. Two different sets of anchor text.

[jdwanchalk]

If anyone is interested, the consensus (from a few people who would know) seems to be that the site is sandboxed.

[Student]

Sorry man

[MJ]

It happens (almost always lately to me), the mistake people make is they stop working on a site when it sandboxes. Keep pushing it hard and it will explode when it re-emerges.

It seems like over optimizing seems to trigger this, link building as well, I'm trying to slowwwww down my development to help avoid it these days.

[Michael Martinez]

I've noticed more people reporting this new Sandbox Effect this year. I'm going to call it Sandbox Effect 3.0 (for my own personal reasons). I think this signals a slight but subtle change in the Google algorithms.

I honestly have no idea beyond that at the moment, but I'll give it some thought and see who else has been thinking this over.

[corpfan1]

I am very curious about this too...it has happened to a couple sites of mine in the past 6 months too.