Ouch! Have I been penalised in G Serps?

[bigturkey]

Something strange has happened to my rankings... it's so dramatic it looks like my site has been penalised?

This page is a review of the leather sleeve I bought:
Designer notebook bag review | Leather laptop sleeve for macbook, by Toffee

... it did rank #6, only a couple of weeks ago for the query:
macbook sleeve review - Google Search

Now, it isn't even on the radar (I digged down to page 7, nothing)...

I'm not sure if it's a site wide penalty, I haven't been measuring my ranking for any given keywords... maybe I should start?

I have noticed my search engine traffic as a whole, decline in the last week or so...

Possible things that could have hurt it?

1) There is a CJ link on a different page to download Skype (but that was always there)

2) I have other websites on the same IP address (unrelated)

3) The product that I reviewed on this page (it was an organic review - I bought it and I liked it) added a link back to my review from their own 'press summary' page.

I don't believe that any of these things are spammy, or worthy of a penalty. Could it be something else?

Also - any advice on how to measure your position in SERPS for certain keywords?

Thanks!

[crankydave]

I'm seeing a total of 12 pages indexed for your site. Only 6 of them are in the regular index.

Google is not showing any links to the site. Not saying there aren't any, they just aren't showing any.

What I think you need to do is work on building links pointing to your site.

Dave

[crankydave]

One additional thought...

The site is a blog. It is not uncommon for Google to pop a blog entry into the index shortly after they pick it up from the feed. Then after that initial period, it gets dropped until they physically index the page and then propagate the information to the different data centers.

I don't think it involves any kind of "penalty".

Dave

[incrediblehelp]

Originally Posted by crankydave

One additional thought...

The site is a blog. It is not uncommon for Google to pop a blog entry into the index shortly after they pick it up from the feed. Then after that initial period, it gets dropped until they physically index the page and then propagate the information to the different data centers.

I don't think it involves any kind of "penalty".

I am guessing this is exactly what happened. I have seen it MANY times over. Google will pick up on fresh pages and rank them for 1-2-3 weeks and if they don't pick up a substantial amount of back links they will settle fr back into the SERPs.

This really throws off newbies that might have not seen it before.

[bigturkey]

Wow! You guys are good. Yes, I've only got a handful of links, and most of them are from forum sigs, so probably not the highest quality. And it is a brand new website only launched this month.

Thanks very much for the insights. I can fully appreciate that that is what has happened.

Now to go about getting some links!

Rich

PS: It felt great to be on the front page of G for a couple of good things... gotta get back there!