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That is to say, should one be checking to see if the sites are out of the sandbox regularly or only when they know there is a major Google update? :)
Thanks
Mc
mykel79, thanks for pointing that out to me, I guess I misunderstood what fclark was saying. And if that is true, I am at a loss for words to explain why this site didn't get sandboxed.
However, I have another site that is deeply sandboxed, and here's what I'm going to do to attempt to get it out.
On some pages, I realized I had more affliate links then I did text, most were search boxes and the links were alot of script, and all were 302 redirects. I removed them all. I think they are weighing down the pages.
I ran a link checker, and fixed all the broken links that I didn't know it had.
I refreshed and reuploaded my original index.htm that I was using before it got sandboxed, where all the links to the internal pages are on the index page.
I added some more interlinking between my pages, and a couple outbounds to some authority sites.
I know they are saying don't touch your sites during this time, but I just feel maybe I can pull it back up, and the reason it's sandboxed is the result of something I recently did. I'll let you know in 48 hrs if anything has happened.
Slow organic link development [very slow, since the site was in the sandbox, it was hard to find using google]. The target search terms jumped about 200 positions overnight. Exactly as expected if there were a flag of some sort that expires. And exactly what I expected to happen since it's fairly clear that such a filter exists and is being used.
Currently more than 50% of my traffic is coming from yahoo/msn. Which is a very big change, the site has the kind of stuff that people used to always use google to find, I never had any significant yahoo traffic before, even though I ranked well for target keywords, geek type stuff.
This suggests to me that more sophisticated users are in fact switching, or have switched, to yahoo/msn in numbers that are becoming significant. Exactly as I would have expected to happen, Google's results are becoming erratic, way too many algo tweaks in way too short a time, the google I was a fan of could be counted on as a bookmark, now my bookmarks in my browser are massive since I can no longer count on consistent google results, especially for technical searches, where I often can't even find what I'm looking for and have to use Yahoo.
When you are looking for an answer to a problem, the age of the site is irrelevant, often there are only a few sites that have those answers, some may be old, some may be new. Playing around with this fact is a very bad strategy for Google to be following. But I don't think they have a choice in this question, this is being forced on them by external constraints, it's not something you would do deliberately. You lower the quality and freshness not because you want to, but because something is making you do that.
This suggests to me that more sophisticated users are in fact switching, or have switched, to yahoo/msn in numbers that are becoming significant.
Based on the the most common search terms with which people are finding my blog I would certainly say that most are NOT sophisticated, but nevertheless I certainly see no evidence that people are turning away from Google.
I personally use Google as my main search engine, rarely using Yahoo and never using MSN. And I'm as sophisticated as users get.
Looking at the referrals for my blog this month, I have 12,000+ from Google, 2500+ from Yahoo and 1200+ from MSN.
And now for an example of a site that is sandboxed by Google, but Yahoo is ranking.:
- Yahoo 15,007
- MSN 7,913
- Google 1,688
- Ask Jeeves 525
Though Google contributes an enormous number of visitors to a majority of my sites, I am learning to cope without Google for newer sites. ;)
The searchers in question are doing sophisticated searches, for technical questions. Maybe I shouldn't have worded it the way I did, it's the search terms that are sophisticated, not the searchers, I don't know anything about them. What I'm seeing now is something I've never seen before, growing numbers of technically oriented users not using google. This is the first time I've been getting any significant traffic from non google sources, that's why I think it's a significant point.
What you see on your site is about the same pattern I see on a standard commercial site I do, that's the inertia I was referring to, the standard user takes a lot longer to switch than your average geek, sort of the rats leaving a sinking ship idea, only google isn't really sinking, it's just making some pretty serious mistakes. Plenty of time to fix it, at least 6 months, but after that, I don't know, I'd sell my google shares sooner than later, well, I'd sell them now, they are at least 10 times over priced, that won't last forever.
Rather, I search with "allintitle" :)
Gives me good results though
Mc
