Sandboxed in Google?

Hi everyone,

I have been at this IM stuff for a couple of years on and off. I really enjoy making the websites and adding content etc. Unfortunately, I have only been able to make about $150 over all that time. Pretty lousy, but I am sure not too uncommon.

Anyways, I found what I thought to be a really good keyword, using the method in Google sniper 2.0 and this was backed up with the keyword tool in Webfire.

Anyways, After setting up the webpage about 2-3 months ago and optimising it, I got up to about rank 34 on google - certainly a good start, so decided to start my Offpage SEO using webfire. I did no article submission, only backlinks to the various articles, forums and blogs that are spat out by the different tools.

My visitors to the blog show about 20 unique visitors per day (according to statpress) but suddenly, I now am showing 'not ranked' in webfire's tracker tool and this is certainly backed up on a normal Google search. I was up to position 19 when suddenly I dropped off the face of the Earth (well in terms of Google!)

I am still showing about 15-20 visitors a day (but not sure how accurate these figures are)

The questions are - why would I suddenly be dropped - I have not done any article spinning or any of that jazz that gets a bad press, and have only been doing manual backlinking, so again, not any black hat there, no mass submissions to raise the questions with the Google algorithms.

Needless to say I am a little disheartened by this, but will not be stopping, but is it worth carrying on with this site, or move onto something else?

Any help would be massively appreciated!