mousepadsonline.com dropped off google like the plague

[Steve Olds]

This site has been up for almost 10 years and has had a great page rank. Last month it disappeared and has not came back. When it was dropped it was #5 on first page for the key words "mouse pads" which is the #1 seach for this product. I searched 50 pages and nothing. I am in a panic. My wife takes care of this and I know nothing. She has been to busy to find out what happened. Any help would be a godsend. Pleeeeese.
www.mousepadsonline.com

[bingo2]

now somewhere past 100 - I think. Don't even know how to tell if i am banned or in sandbox - ANY suggestions?

[Webnauts]

now somewhere past 100 - I think. Don't even know how to tell if i am banned or in sandbox - ANY suggestions?

1. You can check if you are banned here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/sitestatus
2. Sandbox? Well I do not want to start any discussions about that. Just asking, how long does the problem exist, and in which average time-frame does google crawl your site?

At last, could it be that you have been penalized for something? - 30 or - 950 penalty?

[incrediblehelp]

Recently Google "seems" to have discounted paid, reciprocal and other types of in-bound links. To your best knowledge what type of links made up a majority of your back links which led to this top 5 ranking?

[Steve Olds]

I don't know about links or anything about webdesign for that matter. I am just trying to see if anyone thought something looked bad in the script or something
. It is still on MSN (3) and yahoo (19). I am wondering if it was hacked or messed up on purpose by someone. any help would be so awesome.

[Webnauts]

Does not look like your site have been hacked. One possibility can be that as Incrediblehelp said above, it is very possible that diverse backlinks to your site have been devaluated.

Also your HTML semantical structure is not the best, and could be that you have a loss due to that issue.

If not, then you must be facing a kind of penalty. But that requires a lot of work to find that out. Maybe someone has the time here to check that out.

Good luck by the way.

John

[Steve Olds]

Thanks guys,
I could see if I just dropped in the rankings but when you drop off the first 50 pages there must be something bad going on. even if it was the links, when you get to 50 pages back all there is there are secondary pages and stuff and I can't even find my site in there. I was getting a ton of business so the traffic to the site was good. I was one of the only ones that high up that was not paying for Ad Words. Could that be it? Man I am getting into a financial crunch from this. I really need to know what Happened. My wife doesn't do any black Hat things so if we are being penalized, Why. Thank you so much for helping. I really do appriciate it. You'll never know how much.

[incrediblehelp]

I was one of the only ones that high up that was not paying for Ad Words. Could that be it?

No

Have you considered hiring someone to help build your backlinks?

Have you considered building a blog?

Have you tried link baiting or social media?

[dglaeser]

Using archive.org (http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://...padsonline.com), you can see your Title used to be "Mouse Pads - Custom, Photo, Promotional and Gift". How long has your current title of "Custom|Photo|Gift|Promotional Mouse Pads &T-Shirts" been in place? I've seen simple changes like that to a title page drop sites off the Google map, even things like the & have done it in my experience. Anyone else seen this or think the title may have been a cause (at least partially)?

[dglaeser]

You should also look at your backlinks using Yahoo sitexplorer http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com...&bwmo=d&bwmf=u See what bad sites link to you.