Site dropped into oblivion - what to do about it?

[Unknown Webmaster]

I'v recently had fairly new site drop dramatically in the SERP. It was targeting a small niche, and there was very little competition - It were ranking #6-#9 for a couple of weeks.

One day i were working on a gallery page, and had copy-pasted a bunch of links on a page, since I needed to create 10 nearly identical links to pages with pictures. Unfortunately I left the page like that overnight, so Google must have seen 10 links like "keyword1, keyword2" which took up ca. 50% of the page - in the morning the site had dropped to ca #50.

I figured that things would sort themselves out, so I just kept working on the site. After a week the site were still at #50, below some absolute worthless pages, so I submitted it to a couple of link directories (3 if I remember correctly) in the hopes that this would get google to notice that there were no longer anything shady looking on the site and things would start improving.

Now it has dropped even further, and I can 't even find it in the SERP unless I do a search for the doman name.

Would it be possible to remove each and every scrap of information Google has about the site, so I can start over using the same content on another domain?
I'm thinking of the pretty "remove site" button in the webmaster tools..

Or should I just be a good boy, submit a reinclusion request and wait the required 8 years...

[CK]

What day did it drop? You should know but checking referral logs

I ask the date because of this post I made.

Serp changes

The day after that post I noticed a number of -50 penalties. What your seeing could be from that update hence why I asked when it happened. Do I think you should hit the removal tool...no...I would just ride it out

* just to note that if you did something on say Tuesday its unlikely you would see the results of that when you woke up on Wednesday morning*

[Randy Ray]

Is the site still indexed, Unknown?

[Unknown Webmaster]

Randy - The site is still indexed.

Kaus - I'm pretty sure that it happened some time between the 18th and 19th February.

I have just found a almost empty page from the site that is ca. #130 for "keyword1+keyword2", which my front page were ranking for before - but now seems to be gone.

I have had no crawling errors, and it had been a while since I made any changes to the site.

I have PM'ed you both the address (the site really isn't anything special, I just don't want to post the URL publicly).

[Randy Ray]

The best thing to do, if the site is still indexed, is to decide whether or not the site matters to you. If it does, then just keep running your site. Add content on a regular basis, get links on a regular basis, and wait. If the site doesn't matter to you, then just launch a new site and forget about it.

[Unknown Webmaster]

The site doesn't really matter to me - so I will start a new site (I planned on launching a second site anyway).

Will I be able to reuse the content on the new site?

I'v been thinking of taking down the site, requesting Google to remove it through the Webmaster tools and then put up the content on a new site when the first site is gone, but I'm not sure if this would work or just get the new site penalized for duplicate content or something like that..

[Randy Ray]

I'd write new content, if it were me.

[Unknown Webmaster]

Thanks for the advice - I'll go ahead and create a new site with new and exiting content.

And remember to shut out the spiders from the pages I'm working on

[CoolDog]

Could it be that the site went into Google's "sandbox"?

Typically when I launch a new site It gets pretty decent positions, then after a little while it will drop dramatically. Then in a few weeks or months when it gets out of the sandbox it gets back those good positions, or better.

But I don't recall any of my newly launched sites having good positions for weeks before going into the sandbox. Usually a week or less.

[Michael Martinez]

If the page cache shows the broken/incomplete code you may just need to wait until it's recrawled.

Changing the broken page and waiting 2-3 weeks is usually all that needs to be done when a mistake happens.

If after the page cache is updated you still don't experience improvement in rankings, filing a reinclusion request, explaining what happened, should do the trick.