Hexed - 4:17 am on Oct 19, 2005 (gmt 0)

Here is one good theory to why people were dumped in the SERPs:

You were RE-Sandboxed if your site was registered pre late 2003. Read on..

I understand that this won't be the only reason people were dumped as I'm sure there are many deciding factors. However I think one of the main reasons is that the length of the sandbox was increased for popular terms.

Want to find out for yourself? Here's what yo do.

1. visit your favourite whois portal, or use whois from your command prompt if you're running linux or have a windows whois.exe. A good website portal is "www (dot) whois (dot) sc" if you don't have the command.
2. type in "www.yoursite.com"
3. Look at the creaton date and the first record date and record it.
4. visit google.com
5. type in your search term that you used to be ranked for.
6. take the first page of rankings (1-10 or so) and type in the web site domains in www.#*$! and record the date and first record date for each website.

I'm betting that most of the websites still ranking are pre 2003 or early 2003 if it is for moderate to hard search terms. I'm betting (if you were dropped) that your website is late 2003 to now.

Answer these questions in this thread:

1. What is the creation date and first record date of your website?
2. How about some of the competitors in the 1-10 spots in google?
3. How many results does google report for your search terms?

I'll start with one of my websites:

1. My creation date was Jan 2004.
2. My competitors are anywhere from 1996 to 2002.
3. Results 1 - 10 of about 1,680,000

The others which are pre-early 2003 are not dropped.

Hexed

ps - this is my first post here, but I've been around for years and years on other forums and as an seo professional.