Interesting Case Study

[branica]

I found this to be good read on Webmaster World. A case study of a site that was ranking well and now is in a yo-yo of rankings in Google. Normally these are not that great to read but the webmaster has sort of kept it up-to-date. Here is a snippet:

Here's my experience with the graybar/sandbox/-950 effect (I don't know which filter google applied or why).
I own a directory site listing stores of well known brands, the sites has around 2300 pages, most of them being the info pages of singles shops.

The structure is a very classic one: from the homepage you can see the whole directory skeleton, and all the categories and subcategory pages are listed (that's around 25 total internal links).

Each category (brand page) shows an original textual description of the brand and the links to the single stores pages. At the beginning, when the site was 2 months old, almost all the pages ranked well, then suddenly most of them disappeared from serps or listed in the 100+ pages range.

Read the rest here: Graybar, sandbox effect and 3 days long success