The webmaster of www.mamajeanius.co.uk wondered why his site was no longer listed for the keyword “maternity jeans”. Another forum member analyzed the site and found nothing unusual:

Google’s John Mueller joined the discussion to explain why Google did not show the website for the keyword:

“It looks like your SEO (or previous SEO) may have tried to promote your site in a way that’s in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines. Specifically, I see a lot of unnatural links in low-quality articles as well as blog comments left by someone called ‘Maternity Jeans.’

Stopping these practices, cleaning up unnatural links like these, and using the disavow links tool in cases where you can’t clean them up, would be a good step in the right direction.

Over time (and this process can take months), as our algorithms recrawl the affected URLs, reprocess the links found on the web, and update their data, they’ll be able to take the new state into account.”

In other words, the rankings dropped because the website was spamming Google with artificial links.

Google is serious about removing spam from the search results. If you want to get high rankings on Google, you should know that:

• Artificial backlinks (blog comment spam, low quality articles, forum spam, etc.) will get your website in trouble.
• It can take months until your website recovers from bad backlinks (see John’s answer above).

Use white-hat SEO methods to promote your website. It takes longer to get high rankings with these methods but it’s also much safer. If you use white-hat methods to promote your site, your web pages will get high rankings that last.