Where has my site gone?

dropped from google

[BNiUK]

Ok, i'm new so bear with me. I read about this in this forum but i'm not sure if what they're talking about applies to me.

I have a new site that has only started to get spidered for about 3 weeks!(previously stopped by robots.txt) After our first inclusion into the index the site was coming top ten in google for the company name and doing well with internal pages.

It seems that googlebot has spidered once again and this time our homepage got a pagerank of 3. So at this point i'm happy cause i've caught the update and get a pr 3 in 3 weeks.

However, we've been given the pr update but now the homepage and internal pages come nowhere in the serps. The homepage is still in the index though! if i do site:www.domain.com its there.

Is this just a delay from crawling to updating the index of is it more than that?

Thanks.

[tedster]

Welcome to the forums, BNiUK

This sounds like an example of what people call the Google "sandbox effect". Try searching the forums (see site search [webmasterworld.com]) for many many threads about it, and many disagreements on exactly what it is.

According to Google's Matt Cutts, "sandbox" is a misnomer -- in that no set time period is automatically imposed for a domain to show up in search results. Instead, it is a combination of various algorithm elements that often keeps newly found domains from showing until Google sees enough "signals of quality".

And yes, showing up for a week or so at first and then becoming invisible is the common effect.