New Page on Old Site - Appeared in Index and Now Gone

[romerome]

So I have an older site (4 or 5 years). The page ranks well. I created a new page. It took a few days and then it appeared in the index. For the fairly competitive term I was going after it appeared around 25. It stayed there for 3 or 4 days. And then it dissappeared. It has been gone for a week. If I do a search for any unique text in the page in quotes nothing come up in google. It has inbound links. I wrote an initial press release article that is on some articles sites and put it in my blog which gets syndicated. Yahoo shows about 30 links. It has an inbound link from my homepage (pr5). It also saw that it got posted on a legitmate pr6 blog 2 days ago.

So I am trying to figure out why it dissappeared. Here are my ideas.

1) Google has reverted to an older index (doubtful but what I am obviously hoping for). Has anyone seen any title descriptions revert to older ones in the last week. I saw one person post something along these lines.

2) Too many links to fast. Yahoo says 30 but I would guess it has around 70 links. I have no idea how many of those google indexed. I thought this would happen to a site but not an individual page though. If this is the case does anyone have any ideas if this will sort itself out or is that url trashed forever.

3) Changes to page. I made some text changes to the page before it got banned. I changed it mostly back to whatever it was before.

4) Got banned for some other reason.

I know everyone always says this but the page is pretty legititimate. Its an interactive piece of software I wrote. No ads or adsense. Its fairly useful which I guess is how it got on the pr6 blog.

Please help :)

[edited by: tedster at 10:29 pm (utc) on Mar. 25, 2008]
[edit reason] fix formatting issue [/edit]

[tedster]

Google does have the ability to penalize or even ban just one url from a domain. But with a new page it's more common that you are not always seeing the same data center, or that the algo needs to check for some posiible trust issues - especially if any redirects are involved. It's a kind of "sandbox" for a new page,instead of a new domain.

Rapid link growth might be a cause. But if that's so, and the backlinks that the url acquired are legitimate, then I'd expect to see that url come back relatively soon. If there are any purchased links involved that pass PR, then a single page penalty/ban is more likely to be in the picture.