Am I in a sandbox or what?

[Northstar]

My site is a site directory/link list. For years I ranked well in Google. Then two years ago I lost 70% of my google traffic over night and two months later it was back to normal.

Now last year around July 1 I lost 70% of my google traffic again and this time it stuck. I'm still down 70% to this day. I have made no changes to the site and new content/link are added to categories daily. I do have dynamic URLs but they aren't very long (example: http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/pseek/dirs2.cgi?cid=39).

Am I in some type of sandbox or could it be caused by the dynamic URLs? For the life of me I can't figure out what happen or what to do to fix this. Any ideas?

[edited by: tedster at 5:28 pm (utc) on May 29, 2008]
[edit reason] switch to example.com - it can never be owned [/edit]

[tedster]

No, that's not any kind of sandbox - what people called the sandbox affected new sites, not established sites. Also, that kind of dynamic url is not a problem for Google. I'd say you may be caught in the big net that Google cast, looking to keep these kind of directory pages out of their rankings:

1. Too "thin" in the information they offer - nothing much there beyond a basic list of links

2. Stub pages - the category has a page, but it's just an empty shell

3. Too much reciprocal linking - with little else in the backlink profile

4. Link rot - and even worse than 404 links are links to sites that have changed ownership and are now "bad neighborhoods."

5. No enforced editorial policy - directory pages need to show real discretion, rather than accepting every applicant no matter how bad the site