Lost ranking - how long should I wait to see if its permanent

[ThomasTe]

Hi,

A few days ago I noticed that small adsense sites that have ranked great for several months all of a sudden have gone way down the rankings (top 10 sites, and they are now not even in top 100).
If I search on the domain name for these sites it still shows up, so the sites do not seem to have been de-indexed.
I know that google makes this 'dance' once in a while, but this is for a lot (I've checked around 20) of my sites at the same time.
Have you tried this?
If this is just a 'dance', when do you think they should be back to normal?

Thanks.

Best regards,
Thomas

[RustyF]

Small sites generally don't rank well.

How old are they?

You might be in the sandbox

Only you know if you've been up to buying links and got busted for it. Or other such stuff. There isn't enough information here to answer your question.

Auto blog?

[ThomasTe]

Hi Rusty,

It's just small sites, manually created. They are under 1 year old, and I've not gotten any 'bad' links as far as I know (I've been buying bookmarks, articles, etc., the usual stuff), and some of them I've not touched for a while.
I was thinking that since they all have adsense on them, if there's a connection there?
They all contain original content, and only are on a few pages. Could that be the issue? But then, why now and not earlier?

Thanks.

Best regards,
Thomas

[jazbo]

There has been some debate that Google has started something that is clearing out what it sees as cookie-cutter MFA sites.

[ThomasTe]

How is 'cookie-cutter MFA sites' defined?

BR,
Thomas

[jhonsean]

Originally Posted by ThomasTe

Hi,

A few days ago I noticed that small adsense sites that have ranked great for several months all of a sudden have gone way down the rankings (top 10 sites, and they are now not even in top 100).
If I search on the domain name for these sites it still shows up, so the sites do not seem to have been de-indexed.
I know that google makes this 'dance' once in a while, but this is for a lot (I've checked around 20) of my sites at the same time.
Have you tried this?
If this is just a 'dance', when do you think they should be back to normal?

Thanks.

Best regards,
Thomas

Friend its normal and it will takes time for google, be patience just continue your link building process and gain quality backlinks then you will realize yo do the right thing.

[RustyF]

It can be normal. There is something called the sandbox where google will list new sites very low. I have never had that happen on a site I update on a regular basis. You said you're not doing that. That's not good.

There are so many things it could be. It could be the sandbox which is temporary or it could be buying those bookmarks. It could be an affiliate thin site. No content just pitching products. It could be a pitch page, they wont rank well.

Then again, I've seen sites with site links that are engaging in keyword stuffing with misspellings. I don't get that at all. Makes me want to try it but I've worked to hard on my site to do it. Perhaps I should put up a page like it and see what happens.

I would post at least one article a week, more if possible.

[Rakesh]

You shouldn't to be too worried. This is a common phenomenon with sites that are under one year old. Just keep doing what you're doing and don't do anything too black-hat and you should be back in a favourable position.

[deoro]

google changes their algorithm more than 300 times per year so its definitely one of the effects.

[ThomasTe]

Thanks for all your feedback, my friends.

I just discovered yesterday that for some reasons some of my larger sites showing RSS feeds from other sites didn't work, because of the RSS reader. I think that may have something to do with it, since these larger sites also refers to the small ones.

Thanks again, guys.

Best regards,
Thomas

[claritytech123]

What is cookie-cutter MFA sites?

[HarryKing]

I have read this many time, honey moon period for new sites, new sites rank well but suddenly they disappear from Google as they never be there, secondly there is a big chance of sandbox.

[mark587905]

This happens weekly to my sites, just keep building backlinks and adding quality content and youll reappear.

[shuvo]

It may happen anytime as google continuously change their algorithm.If you want permanent position the you have to work continuously on your keywords.

[dminorfmajor]

Originally Posted by jazbo

There has been some debate that Google has started something that is clearing out what it sees as cookie-cutter MFA sites.

I look at it this way. If Google is actually sandboxing or getting rid of these Xfactor/CookieCutter websites then that takes actual effort from their staff. It takes manpower and paid employees to go out looking for these. If they were so hellbent on stopping these, why wouldn't they just come right out and tell the public that they are cracking down on all cookiecutter sites? This would at least stop new ones from being built for the most part.

Why would we then want to waste the time and effort of researching, buying domain and building the websites if we know they're just going to get taken down before or shortly after they start to get traffic?

I know cookie cutter sites do not take much time to make but I'm not going to waste time building a 5 page, unique content site, buy the domain name and research if I know it's going to be useless in 3 months. At that point, I'm just going to focus on a keyword of 5,000+ searches with multiple pages that is NOT cookie cutter.

I ramble...anyways, my point is this. In my opinion, Google is not sandboxing sites just because they're 1-2 pages and the exact same layout as thousands of other sites. They're sandboxing because you're breaking some other type of rules. If your content is helpful, unique, not spammy and your backlinking method is legit then you should not have anything to worry about.

[ThomasTe]

Thanks for all the input, guys.

Best regards,
Thomas

[yanivkalfa]

What have you done since then? are all these website on same server? have you experienced anything weird with the server - maybe server was done for couple of days or something like that ?

I am pretty sure that if you'll continue what you were doing before you'll be ok unless something bad happen maybe your host went down for a week or so

i had my website dropping 15 places because my host was down for a week . what more annoying was that they take no responsibility for that and say that their TOS protects them from these kind of ****. i read the T.O.S and its true they say they take no responsibility . Bah

[ThomasTe]

My sites are hosted with one account at godaddy.
I think the drop may be due to some of my sites linking to them. I had some rss feeds from goarticles on them, but for some reason this made my pages crash, so the sites (that linked) were down for a few days. I give it some more days, and see what happens.

Thanks.

BR,
Thomas