This week one of our readers, Taz, the 25 year old owner of http://www.beardcareproducts.com, wrote in looking for help with his website rankings:
Hi Evan,
I’m glad I found your site…we started an online business called www.beardcareproducts.com and were ranking pretty high and then suddenly dropped way, way down. We are still in the index, so I hope we can regain our position by implementing some of your suggestions. I’m 25 so still a YE!
You probably get a lot of inquiries so if its possible could you let me know what might have affected my site’s rankings? We only started June 13th, 2007…and haven’t violated guidelines. I haved used keywords appropriately and recently reduced the density just in case that was having an effect. In Webmaster tools, I’m still in the index…but don’t know why I lost my rankings…any help in this regard would be appreciated.
I asked Taz for more details…
Hi Evan,
Thanks for the help, I really appreciate it. I noticed that the ranks I had on Google are still retained on MSN almost exactly. Here are the Keywords & Former Positions on Google:
Beard Lotion #1
Beard Care Products #1
Beard Care #2
Beard Grooming #5
Beard Shampoo #7Even if I put beardcareproducts.com (my url) into Google, I still rank below a site that links to me. I signed up for Google’s Webmaster Central and there are no crawl errors. I lost my rankings around July 27th. Site has been online since June 13th, so a little over a month.
Kind Regards,
Taz
I hate to be the bearer of bad news and let a fellow internet entrepreneur down but it will hard to get the rankings back quickly. I have noticed two distinct trends that often occur with brand new websites:
1) They get sandboxed and do not get any recognition by Google. The more spammy the industry tends to be the longer you can get sandboxed. For example, a friend of mine launched a blog offering practical money savings tips for every day life (a great read) but because there are so many fake sites in this industry, his site is still in the sandbox after being around for six months and having quality sites link to him.
2) They get top rankings quickly only to disappear from the index a few weeks later. This seems to be the case with Taz’s website. He was on top of Google’s results and soon got downgraded severely. Do not feel bad – it usually takes a sustained effort to rank for any sort of mildly-competitive keyword, let along the difficult ones. One month in should not get you a ton of search engine traffic. Google is on my website every day and it can still take a few weeks for a new article to get picked up and put into their index.
My solutions for Taz? Check back tomorrow 
Evan Carmichael
