Rose Water

(Ryan’s Note: Was it really neccessary to add that Rose Water link in here? They all get nofollowed anyway)

It “could” be that it got a penalty for too many links,

OR….

as everybody knows, Google uses multiple data centers, and each time you search you could be hitting a different data center.

Since the site in question was really new, it could have been that it didn’t propogate to all the data centers yet… so it was there, then due to a data refresh or something… searchers hit a different data center that didn’t yet know about the site, then boom a few days later as data updated througout all the servers… boom it was back again and ranking well.

I’d really like for Matt Cutts to chime in and issue a statment on whether or not there’s anything a competitor can do to harm your ranking….

as I still haven’t seen any evidence to make me believe that factors 100% outside of a site owner’s control can penalize him. (the key word here being penalize, as many seos tend to confuse “lack of reward” with “penalty”)

http://www.seobook.com/archives/001550.shtml

i cant say for certain, but it is my ‘hope’ that Google sticks with what i belive was the mindset of not ever negatively affecting your rank based on what occurs outside of your domain.

i have read that bowling works, but i havent seen it first hand and ‘hope’ that google only Negatively hits you for your own dumb mistakes on your site.