My site is located at http://pcgames.atspace.com I was getting almost all of my traffic from google. Something has gone wrong this last week, I get nothing from google now, my site name is in the 60s in the SERPS, and used to be #1. My pagerank disappeared for about one day, but has returned to normal, but visitors have not. I've had nothing for almost a week now. MSN has indexed about half of my site but does not show up in the results for anything (assuming it'll take a while for some reason). About a week ago I made two major changes to my site:

1. I removed some text that may have seemed spammy. I wasn't cramming my site with keywords, but maybe had a few instances of buy pc games on shop pages, I changed quite a bit and made some optimizations so that the site wouldn't appear as spammy when it came up in search results.

2. This is the one that concerns me. In my shop section, I have many games listed and I had been adding price/system requirements pages for most of the games there. I originally had them set to noindex but decided that there was a possibility of getting traffic from these pages if they were indexed. A lot of people do search for system requirements after all, and a lot of those seeking the requirements may be buyers. I suddenly changed about 70 pages to 'index' so they could be indexed.

This is very disturbing because my site is young (about three months), but it has earned me some money so far. Not a lot, but it's enough to keep me inspired. Everything has flatlined (I wish MSN would hurry up so this doesn't affect me so bad). I've changed almost all of the pages back to noindex for my system requirements pages. I'm hoping to add them gradually to index status, praying this penalty/sandbox/wtf is it will end. And I imagine removing some excess keywords wouldn't affect me this much. So I'm riding on #2 but biting my nails.

Any speculation on what went wrong with google? And if anyone would happen to know if MSN does just take a while...

Thanks,
Carl

Your site isn't well optimised for such a competitive market, it's an amazon affiliate site among thousands and it's quite normal for new sites to rank highly for a few weeks when new before being relegated to oblivion until you make it better.

Backlinks, unique content and patience is the cure

Yeah, my reviews have sold more games than my shop section which is mostly taken from amazon. I guess because they're unique as poor a writer as I may be. I'll write more and get more link partners with gaming sites. I was afraid that could be it, but I guess if I have to work to come back in the engine I could come back stronger. Thanks for the response.