Is this some kind of ban?

Found something weird about "site:.domain" searches

[kostej]

Hi all,
I have two sites about "Prague widgets", let's call them site A and site B. Site A disappeared from Google SERPs during Jagger updates. Its positions had been nothing brilliant, but now when I search for "Prague widgets" it is nowhere to be seen, while the second site (site B) sits tight on position #70.

And now the surprise: When I search for "Prague widgets site:.cz", site A sits on position #55, site B sits right next to it on position #56, so they have very similar ranking.

To recapitulate:
search string "Prague widgets site:.cz"
site A: position #56
site B: position #55
search string "Prague widgets"
site A: bottom of hell
site B: position #70

Does it indicate that there is some kind of ban or resandboxing for site A? Does anyone have the same experience? It ranks quite well on Yahoo and MSN. Both sites use reciprocal linking, a few triangle links, a few one-way links, no redirects, no invisible text, keyword spamming, doorways etc. Any advice will help.

Thanks

[Tinus]

Is it possible on some pages one or two fragments of the content are more or less simular (I don't mean only 100% equal)to that of other pages or maybe simular to parts of the content of site B? If so it might be a filter puting your site down on money keywords.

[CainIV]

Iwould agree. The site that has the worse seprs (aka bottom of hell) was it registered domain-wise or created later?

If so this might point to a dupe penalty.

search string "Prague widgets site:.cz"
site A: position #56
site B: position #55

This search string is not competitive because of this:

site:.cz

Heavily penalized sites will still often rank for non competitive keywords.

[kostej]

Thanks for replies. They verify my fears of ban on my site A.

Both sites are quite old, however I recently begun to optimize my site A. I changed Title tags, deleted lots of old outbound links pointing to non-existent pages, negotiated dozens of new link exchanges, slightly adjusted onpage texts to be more SEO-friendly etc... Is it possible that that ban is connected to Over Optimalization Penalty?

[Tinus]

I often notice a decline in visitors from G. after changing Title tags in pages. Mostly a month or so later things return to normal. If you change content and specially title and content tags a lot and to fast your problem can be the sandbox (what ever that is) as well. Site will pop-up later again. If the site is finished wait and see. Maybe it is good to check your site for dup content (fragments of site B or equal fragments on site A).