Sandboxed or Penalized?

How do you really know?

[nzmatt]

Simple question - with a no doubt complicated answer:

How does a webmaster really know if their site is sandboxed or penalized or both?

It would be very bad to do nothing on the assumption a new site which is competing for money terms will eventually be let out of the sandbox when it is actually subject to a filter or penalty other than the “sandbox”! I could be waiting in vain forever - perpetual cruelty!

How do we really know?

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

I would say that if you do a search for a four or five word string from your site (without quotes) and it is not listed in the first few results then you are probably sandboxed.

[walkman]

"I would say that if you do a search for a four or five word string from your site (without quotes) and it is not listed in the first few results then you are probably sandboxed. "

or your site is seen a dupe because of [webmasterworld.com...]

[RoadTrips]

If your site is seen as a dupe, but you clean it up before the next update, do you have a pretty good chance of making it back?

[walkman]

"If your site is seen as a dupe, but you clean it up before the next update, do you have a pretty good chance of making it back?"

unless google has automatic penalties and I think it does. For example 60 days or something similar. Eventually you will, the question is when?

[Craig_F]

I've been wondering this as well. I have a site that I launched 2 months ago and it is rocking everywhere except Google.

Google just won't index the site (yes, it has incoming links) for some reason. The is pretty much like every other site I've ever built, all of which usually get indexed within a few days of launch.

At this point I'm assuming the domain I bought may have been penalized previously, but how can I tell for sure? I've checked everything I know to check and I see no sign of any site that may have existed before using this domain...although I'm sure there was one.

So, I'm now considering switching to a new domain, which KILLS me because the one I'm using now is so perfect. But what else can I do?

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

I'm afraid I've lost the place here but what has this to do with the original question. (I don't have time to read all the way through the thread you mentioned.)

[2by4]

First of all, look at your calendar. Mark the day you pointed your first link at your site. Move ahead 6 months. That's roughly when your site may come out. That may change. Some people say it's 9 months. I saw 6.

Don't even think of penalties if the time is less than 6 months. Make sure to avoid penalty causing things like duplicate content, bad link schemes, linking to bad neighborhood sites, onpage overoptimization, sitewide over optimization of link text.

Watch forums like this for 'the sandbox has ended' type threads. When and if it ends, or changes in duration, there will be massive threads on that subject.

[Rollo]

I'm not sure the terms are exclusive expect that I would say something shady that you've done that causes your site to drop is a penalty. Something shady that Google does to cause your site to drop is a sandbox. I guess it depends on who's talking...

[2by4]

"something shady that you've done that causes your site to drop is a penalty. Something shady that Google does to cause your site to drop is a sandbox. I guess it depends on who's talking..."

This one should go in the WebmasterWorld hall of fame, that's very well put, LOL

[Powdork]

Craif_F- Two months is not long at all and if you get a new domain you will be starting the 6-9months over at 0.
Here are some things to check.
1. Is your site crawled by Googlebot?
2. Is it indexed? (i.e. do the pages show up with the site:www.yourdomain.com seacrh?)
3. Have you entered your url into the wayback machine at archive.org?
4. Have you asked Google if it is penalized by sending an email to [e-mail] with the subject line of reinclusion request.

Keep your domain, don't change because of G if it is rocking elsewhere. If worse comes to worst block googlebot from this domain and then get another and block slurp and msnbot from that one.

[eyezshine]

It took my site about 7 months and it came out of the sandbox. But my site was so optomized that when the traffic came it used up all my 30 gig of bandwidth in 3 days!

Then my host shut down my site and replaced every page with a page that said,

"This customer has used up all it's alotted amount of bandwidth"

Every page on the site said that and every page got a code 200 page ok! Which caused massive duplicate content.

Instant ban from google!

I've heard people say over and over to never use shared hosting and get a dedicated server but I didn't listen?

Just a warning for those of you who come out of the sandbox suddenly. Google can crash a site that quick!

[eyezshine]

By the way, after I put the site back on a new server, it finally got spidered and indexed again about 3 months later.

but it's in the sandbox again. And it's sitting there on a dedicated server all by itself just waiting for that special day when google opens the flood gates again.....

Oh yes, one special day I know it'll happen again....

[2by4]

How many page views was that 30 gig? You must have had a lot of graphics or something, 30 gig is a lot. I'm a fan of very lightweight pages, prepares you better for stuff like that. That's a sad story. It's not so much shared hosting though, it's the wrong shared hosting, a good company would simply have billed you for the extra bandwidth, then you could have switched servers in a few days, nothing would ever have happened that visitors would have seen.

[McMohan]

How does a webmaster really know if their site is sandboxed or penalized or both?

My 2cents. Combination of few factors that will shout the site is sandboxed -

1. New domain (Roughly After Jan-04)
2. Ranks well on other engines (Most reasons that cause a penalty in Google will also apply in others. Exceptions ofcourse are there)
3. Ranks well with allin...
4. The site has decent PR
5. Regularly visited by the bot.
6. Last but never the least, you know, you haven't done anything that may cause a penalty.

Mc

[eyezshine]

I was getting

60,699 Tuesday, July 20, 2004
65,518 Wednesday, July 21, 2004
59,675 Thursday, July 22, 2004

Those were my google adsense impressions only. I couldn't check my stats cuz I'm not with that host anymore.

Then friday my site was shut down and by monday I was banned from google or blocked? Whatever you want to call it?

3 days of pure happiness! HAHAHA! What a high!

[Craig_F]

Powdork,

Thanks for chiming in. Here's a few answers for you:

1 & 2) No to both. And while I know 2 months is not that long, I have not had to wait longer than a week for Google to index any of my sites before (I guess I could be lucky for that), and that's what has me worried...this site was created and promoted exactly the same as all others.

3) Yes, and I don't get anything useful.

4) No because I'm afraid of that. The site is nice, but it's affiliate stuff and I'm not sure they'll like what they see.

Keep your domain, don't change because of G if it is rocking elsewhere. If worse comes to worst block googlebot from this domain and then get another and block slurp and msnbot from that one.

That's a good idea I wouldn't have thought of, I'll keep it in mind. Do you think it is worth the effort? While it would be sad to lose the perfect domain, I'm pretty sure I can get another one that should work as well just not look and sound as nice. Also, one big problem with your idea is it would kill link development unless you have an idea how to avoid that too...

Back to the topic -- is there any way to tell for sure if a domain is penalized these days?

[eyezshine]

My sites that have been hijacked I can tell they are not banned by doing an inurl:mydomain.com search and usually it'll show results something like

Results 1 - 8 of about 5,800

Then when I apply the &filter=0 I get 0 results at all.

Google won't let me see the other 5800 results which I know are my long lost pages that are indexed but blocked because of the hijackers and dupe content.

But the 8 results that do show, are the hijacker urls with the php 302 redirect to my site.

This is clearly a dupe filter block from my site.

[nzmatt]

Thanks for the nice post McMohan:

1. New domain (Roughly After Jan-04)
2. Ranks well on other engines (Most reasons that cause a penalty in Google will also apply in others. Exceptions ofcourse are there)
3. Ranks well with allin...
4. The site has decent PR
5. Regularly visited by the bot.
6. Last but never the least, you know, you haven't done anything that may cause a penalty.

I wonder if there are any other indicators?

Here are the answers when Mysite is applied to your points:

1. Launched early July
2. Ranks very well in MSN Beta and Yahoo & MSN (the later two engines rank the site very well but have only indexed about 50 pages!)
3. Rank is no better with allin!
4. Site's PR is 5 throughout about 2000 pages as indexed by MSN Beta and Google.
5. Googlebot visits every / every other day (around 3000 hits) Googlebot was the first to visit and index (about a week after launch)
6. I guess there is possibility of duplicate content where we run a PHP database which can be queried in different ways thereby creating many similar pages with different URLs. We do also have some internal link text as keywords - but these are the natural titles and we would have to go out of our way to creatively term them something different.

As you can see Mysite may be both sandboxed and duplicate penalty - but how do I now for sure without waiting for 6-9 months only to find that it is was sandboxed and is still penalized?

If the database is creating dup’ content when queried in different ways, how can I stop this without loosing user functionality and ease of use?

I designed Mysite for the user. I believed all the predominant thinking of a year or so ago: "content is king, don't design for search engines, design for people."

Now is seems this advice is false, because onsite ease of database searching seems to trip a duplication filter, keywords in your internal links are bad (so you cannot call a spade a spade) and a new site seems to be sandboxed for no other reason than that it is new.

Ironically, now more than ever, a webmaster must design a new site with search engines (Google), rather than people in mind!

Progress?

[eyezshine]

One of my sites I built has beat the dupe content filter by placing random quotes on the pages making all of the pages different from the other because the quotes allways change every time the page is visited.

I use 5 different quotes on each page and there are about 100 quotes all together.

This seems to also stop the hijackers from causing a dupe penalty too. If that is really what is causing the problem which I don't think it's the case but we'll see.

As for the sandbox, The domain was registered november 14 2004 and it seems to be doing as expected for a new site to do this early. It has a PR2 despite the 5,949 links MSN Beta says it has pointing at it. Maybe by the next PR update it will go up?

I just think it takes alot longer to calculate PR for new sites. Plus the rubber band effect, PR has, is another problem I see with new sites. One month the new site ranks well and the next month it ranks poorly. Then the next month it ranks better than the first month, and so on until the Page Rank levels out.

I think the sandbox smooths out the rubber band effect by putting a filter on new links for about 3 months. Then after 3 months the first few links the site has start giving PR.

Until then your site get's a trickle of traffic for obscure keywords.

[2by4]

"I built has beat the dupe content filter by placing random quotes on the pages making all of the pages different from the other because the quotes allways change every time the page is visited."

That's a very good idea.

[union_jack]

Hi my site was ranked superbley well upto the last major update, i have worked on the site for 7 years, never ever done anything to cause a penalty on purpose. I am adding lots of unique content everyday, then suddenly bang all my pages drop too the 100 place mark. I have been reading the forums like crazy over christmas. I read eyshines post ran the command all in url with my domain name and the only pages that show are other peoles websites with my url at the end of the there url, and they are showing my front page.

Can any body tell me why

A/ They do this, what benefit to them is it

B/ Is this why i have been dropped down the rankings

C/ Is there anything i can do about this

I am at my wits end i have no money at all coming in, bills everywere and a nagging wife and 2 kids. I can not belive somebody could destroy all my work for nothing.

Please Help

[jaffstar]

Some of my sites pop into the serps for 1-2 days, then they vanish, then they come back. For me there is hope, I know they have not been penalized.

Anyone know why they pop in and out of the serps like this?