My site is Cursed!

If the article is already on EZA and indexed, it's possible that Google is putting you into it's "Supplemental Index". It's a subtle way to punishing duplicate content.

You can see how many of your pages are in the Supplemental Index using this tool.

Supplemental Index Ratio Calculator

New sites can often rank well for a few days and then suddenly disappear.

Google loves to find new information but if there are not a lot of inbound links pointing to a site, it will drop back down to its true place.

Over time it can work its way back up.

Posting unique information on topics you want to rank for will help you rank better.

Thanks a lot guys, that was very helpful. 11 of my pages are in the supplemental index - those were all the articles that I'd put up. Now my site is made by wordpress - I deleted those articles ages ago, but google still seems to be indexing them... I've got the xml sitemaps plugin installed, but it doesn't seem to be making any changes... :s what to do now? How do I tell google those 11 pages aren't a part of my website anymore?

You have a brand new domain competing against established sites in a high competition area. Your site will bounce around, be indexed and deindexed and other such stuff for months. That's just the way things are with Google. Just keep building links and don't worry about stuff you don't need to like duplicate content on other sites.

Most of all, don't sit there fretting and wasting energy over one site but continue to build new ones, both supporting and money sites.

Thanks guys
bgmacaw: I think you're right - I need to get out there and make more sites, no point putting all my eggs into one basket eh?
pts123: the url removal thing is a bit weird - I requested one url to be removed once, but the request was denied :s. I have requested a reconsideration btw, and I think it's been granted - my site when I checked today, was the last result on the first page :p ... I'll keep at it with the backlinks

John Hocking: can I do this while keeping all my backlinks? Need to look into this if it happens again, thanks

This same thing has happened to me and I didn't even realize why either! I had been copying product descriptions from my affiliate site and got some of my pages dropped.

Thanks for the info!

lol you can't even copy your own stuff - how crap is that? Yeh, I don't think I'll be copying anything again. I had completely given up on my site, yet still adding backlinks occasionally without thinking it'd do anything, but my website is on the first page of google again and hope is restored, weeeeyyyy!

Hmmm I do get the feeling that this whole supplemental index thing is temporary though. I had some ezine articles that I copied over to goarticles - just copied and pasted. Either my articles were indexed initially by google and then deindexed, or they were never indexed in the first place. I totally lost hope and gave up on that goarticles account, but just recently - without adding any backlinks whatsoever, my goarticle versions of the articles are ranking way better than my ezine articles.

Methinks Ezine Articles are only good for that initial surge of viewers when you first post an article, after that it's kinda shite. Only reason now that I may post on Ezine Articles first, is to see how the link through rate is - then I can take the good articles (I've had up to 50% link-throughs before - awesome!), post them on goarticles and backlink the hell out of them. I'd only do this with the good articles because backlinking takes bloody AAAAGEEEESS! Even with roboform for firefox.