Am I being penalized? Or sandboxed? Or both?

[RHarris]

Almost 3 years ago I launched
http://songsforteaching.homestead.com , which later became http://songsforteaching.com/index.html Since lots of high-content sites linked to it, it ranked high for almost any kind of song....Spanish songs, math songs, and so on.

Last summer, I started getting out of Homestead's proprietary software, and put those same pages on Dreamweaver with the suffix .htm

I enjoyed high rankings until now -- almost 6 months after launching the new pages. Now my new pages are way down, and my old Homestead pages (that merely link people to my new pages) have resurfaced.

Am I being penalized? Delayed sandboxed? Or what?

BTW, I never used metatags, and never seemed (until now) to suffer because of it.

Do you think I'm being penalized for spamming? What would you recommend I do?

Thanks in advance.

[minstrel]

You're not banned. The new version of your site is showing a toolbar PR6 with about 3540 reported backlinks, although many or most of those seem to be internal links (looks like you have 5280 pages in Google's index.

I'm not sure what search terms you've optimized for but I tried "songs for teaching" and interestingly the #1 and #2 spots are for the old homestead site, but they are both redirect pages:

Songs for Teaching has moved!Songs for Teaching has moved! Please click here to visit our new, improved site.
songsforteaching.homestead.com/ - 4k - Cached - Similar pages

Spanish Songs for TeachingOur selection of Spanish Songs is better than ever! Please click here to visit our new section.
songsforteaching.homestead.com/Spanish.html - 4k - Cached - Similar pages
[ More results from songsforteaching.homestead.com ]

It looks to me like you need to track down backlinks to the homestead site and ask them to update their links.

The #3 listing is your new site (recently cached too):

Songs for Teaching: Educational Children's Music... The Songs for Teaching Store Recordings, Song Books, Picture Books, and Professional References. ... Songs for Teaching 6632 Telegraph Rd. ...
www.songsforteaching.com/ - 16k - 24 Dec 2004 - Cached - Similar pages

[RHarris]

Thanks, minstrel, for your reply. I'm trying to contact the webmasters that linked to my old site, but most don't include contact info in their own sites.

Here are some examples of my new site falling off the cliff:

spanish songs: My old site is #3. The new site isn't in the first 100.

science songs: My old site is #8. The new site 85.

I've never used metatags. Do you think that I should?

Thanks again.

[minstrel]

Try sending email to one of these "generic" addresses:

webmaster@domain.com
admin@domain.com

where "domain.com" is the name of the website linking to you.