How long does the 'Penalty' last for

anyone got experience of how long it takes to get out

[hughie]

It was decided a few weeks ago that my site was 'sandboxed'. My site is PR 4 and shows up in the
allin.... search for my keywords(no.4 for most) and is nowhere(not in first 40 pages) for the standard search.

From peoples experience, how long is it going to take to start getting proper listings. Is there anything I can do to speed things up a bit or is it sit tight time?

also..

Do all new sites get sandboxed in this way or is it only when keyword density is such that it is obvious the site has been SEO'd?

Cheers,
Hughie

[JuniorOptimizer]

Dman, you say 90 days. So your network dropped in February but returned in May?

[drall]

Exactly 90 days to the hour. 20 sites all came back across the board, all in different formats, all on seperate ip ranges, all with pr 5-7. Only variable that was constant was interlinking of the sites.

When you take away all of the variables leaving only one constant only one conclusion can be drawn.

I feel bad for the new webmaster personally, if your not established I think it is going to be very hard to break out now things being as they are.

Between semantics, the unreal tons of html spam that now fill the serps and Gs attempted combat of this spam it leaves much to be desired from 8 months ago.

Dman

[Copper]

Hi Drall & MHes,

I agree with drall, Out of 5 sites, 3 sites have started coming back to their original position in G.
I am not sure exactly how much time it really took, but I surely know it took a hell of a time.
But 90 days! Phew!....Thats surely a hell of a time to wait.

Also needed some advice here:
One of the sites is missing altogether from G ( not surprising, since it has got a lot many HIDDEN backlinks ), now the question is how come the site PR is still 5 after almost a couple of months. I understand that if G penalizes a site, its PR should be 0 right?.

Any help would be highly appreciated.

Cheers
Copper

[JuniorOptimizer]

The are usually 0/10. Does site: show any pages?

[Copper]

Hi JuniorOptimizer,

Thanks for the reply.

Yes. The site does show all the pages in G when I search for site:url.com

[JuniorOptimizer]

Copper,

I don't think you're penalized at all. Usually the site: command shows no pages and the site is 0/10. That's either for very new sites or ones that have been removed.

[nuevojefe]

Copper,

does the site: or allinurl: command show descriptions or just titles for your pages?

[allanp73]

Drall,

I see don't see what you are seeing. I had a site that was no.1 for several terms than the next day gone, out of top1000. Will it come back, I doubt it not unless I get a much higher pr. Currently, it is only a pr4. I frankly do not believe in this Sandbox theory. I see many older sites affected as well.

[Copper]

Hi JuniorOptimizer

(( I don't think you're penalized at all. Usually the site: command shows no pages and the site is 0/10. That's either for very new sites or ones that have been removed. ))

Ok. Thanks. I really appreciate your reply.

Hi nuevojefe

<< does the site: or allinurl: command show descriptions or just titles for your pages? >>
It shows everything, the title, description.

Cheers
Copper

[sit2510]

wanderingmind,

>>> yes sandbox applies to links, not sites. But then, if it applies to links, it applies to your site too - right?

Definitely, that's the logic, but not another way round. Sandbox of links is the cause which leads to sandbox of new sites which is the effect.

>>> To say that Google doesnt care about whether you are getting 500 links per day or not - if that's right, they shouldnt care about 5000 either. or 50000. You think its possible that Google has not put in a safeguard against sudden appearance of massive links? ..... the majority opinion on why sandbox was put in place?

First of all, I'm not a spammer. My comment is only concerned with the moderate seo practices, and not with the extreme. To reply to your question:

It is not a problem whether you get 500 links per day or even 50,000 links per day, but the problem is "how Google view, had viewed and will view the site(s) that give you those links." Natural massive links are totally different from the extreme side of unnatural massive linking - and of course I believe Google has mechanisms to discount that unnatural way, far more than the sandbox.

You see it is not that easy to get 50K links a day, but that does not mean impossible. You can get it from 1 super big site or from different networks which normally belong to the same owner(s). In many cases, these owners have similar bad habits that can be detected and trigger G algo to safeguard against this abuse. This real mechanism would be different from the one of sandbox.

The key is to do the things "moderately". If you go to an extreme, it is another mechanism that will hammer you down and not the sandbox which acts as a temporary barrier.

[kiwi webmaster]

What does it mean when google ranks your site in it's results but without the title and text - just the URL with a 'similar pages' link underneath?

[nuevojefe]

Good indicator of penalty or some other issue. It's definitely not good. Have you checked using the toolbar if the page in question is indexed?

[Bobby]

How long does the 'sandbox' last for

Today 2 sites I had optimized finally came out in the Google index.

1st site took 6 weeks
2nd site took 3 weeks

[webnewton]

[webmasterworld.com...]
[****.com...]

[JuniorOptimizer]

Kiwiwebmaster, check all your basics like meta tags, title, etc. That could be the issue.

It also seems that on very big sites with a lot of pages, many will be indexed that way at first, and then later updated to having the correct attributes. I've seen that enough to think you have little to be concerned with.

[kiwi webmaster]

Thanks for your input.

The strange think about this whole drama is that pagerank remains at 6 (home page) and 5 for most of the other pages.
Yet google is treating it like the site no longer exists.
I just don't understand.

[uncle_bob]

I know folk often ask how to get google to index their site properly instead of just displaying the url without the title and text, and I don't have an answer for that, ... but ... I do know how to get google to go from having a proper title and text index, to just a url only index. Just set your robots.txt to block all spiders from accessing your site for only two weeks, and hey presto urls only in the index :-( .

Hope I won't be making that mistake again soon .