a sudden drop in site's rankings

[Mister_L]

Hi,

A few months ago I bought a website about widgets who turned up on page 5 in google images.After a little SEO work the site climbed to page 4...it stayed there for a few weeks,and then I noticed a strange thing: when I looked for widgets in Google, some of the times I found my site on page 4,and some of the times I didn't find it anywhere near.

Then one day it completely stopped showing and my visitors' number dropped by two thirds.

Could anyone guess what in the world happenned?

Thanks.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 5:54 pm (utc) on Mar. 19, 2009]
[edit reason] removed specifics [/edit]

[SteveWh]

Create an account at Google Webmaster Tools, and see if there are any diagnostic reports to indicate what's going on.

Also see the Google Quality Guidelines and make sure all your SEO methods were within their rules. There are some SEO techniques they do not like.

[Mister_L]

I looked at Google Webmaster Tools.
The only thing that came up there was duplicate meta descriptions for 12 pages,but that existed back when I bought the site...Maybe this is it?

Cause no other problems were reported and I didn't use any dirty tricks (hidden text,cloaking,irrelevant keywords etc.).

[SteveWh]

I'd change the metas so they don't all duplicate each other, but I agree that it's unlikely that would be the reason for such a sudden drop.

How old is this site? A new site often gets ranked fairly high for a short time and then falls back. This is an intentional effort by Google to give new sites some initial visibility.

[martinibuster]

There was an image search update last month.
[webmasterworld.com...]

Also, is it possible the person who sold you the site removed some links?