Popular website Sandboxed

[kelleybelly]

Hi, In my industry there are a few key players includng myself for some big $$ words. There is one website who is my competitor who has been #1 for a single key word that is searched for 900,000 times a month according to overture results so you know its even more then that. Anyhow this site I am talking about is a fortune 500 company with an awesome site, no spam or anything. There main url has been dropped since the last update. All of there other pages are still indexed. The reason For this post is becuase the other top competitor in our industry, is now using their title tag word for word, except subsituting the company name aout with their own. Is it possible that the Fortune 500 company that got dropped because if duplicate title tags from its competittion who stole it and google got mixed up. I know who had it first I had both of theirs memorized as I look at their sites every day for thrree years?

I feel really bad for the first company if so I know they spent 100million to purchase that company in 1999 and have been successful. The one who stole their home page title is a PR8 and is successful too. So could Google be confused? IT scares me because it could happen to any of us.

[karmov]

This has nothing to do with the alleged "sandbox". That is collection of penalties/filters/delayed benefits that affect only brand new sites.

It sounds like that site either suffered some penalties or made some other changes that otherwise got them bumped. Knowing why/how someone else got dropped from the SERPs is really hard because you have no idea what they may have done. Although their site looked like "an awesome site, no spam or anything", there's no telling how many dark grey techniques they were using in the background to stay at the top of a competitive SERP.

Don't worry about it, keep your focus on your own site.

[neuron]

There main url has been dropped since the last update. All of there other pages are still indexed.

Does the site have any pages that rank, say, in the top 30 for any competitive keyterms? If so, then this is not the sandbox. The sandbox is not an indexing problem but a ranking problem. Just because one keyterm dropped out of the ranks does not a sandbox make. The sandbox seems to affect the entire domain (all the pages, none of them rank for anything even quasi-competitive).

Sounds like just another google glitch to me. The site will probably reappear in the next few weeks.

[kelleybelly]

Hi, Yes they still rank well for other keyword phrases. You are right the site is not sandboxed. If you type in their domain name, it does not exist in google.

I thought that maybe it was because the competitor is now using their 10 word title tag word for word and is now ranking for the singular keywords that they used to rank for and maybe their homepage got rempved for duplicate content?

I have looked at their code as much as I could, back links, etc. Honestly I have never seen anything wrong with their site. It is just a quality site with great content, but I could be wrong. The only thing that peaked my interest was the fact that the other site completely changed their title to copy its competitor and now one page (the domain name) had disappeared.
They are still a PR7 even on the home page as well as site wide, but not indexed by google.

[MHes]

>for a single key word that is searched for 900,000 times a month according to overture results so you know its even more then that

Overture search figures are partly an indication of search terms used by people but very often a term chosen by a publisher for part of his page content.

What can happen is a webmaster will create a page about, for instance, blue widgets. This is a popular page and gets 900,000 page views per month. At the bottom of the page the webmaster has put an overture feed for the search term 'pink widgets' and a message saying, "if you want information on pink widgets try these sponsored listings".

Overture will see 900,000 calls for a search on 'pink widgets' although in reality noone may have actually ever searched for that phrase. The searches are triggered by people searching for 'blue widgets' and not 'pink widgets'

[kelleybelly]

Hi, The single keyword I am postitive is searched for a lot, I am sure Overture is not accurate, but the keyword that I am talking about is definately searched for a lot. That is what we all strive for right? I know that a single keyword in an industry is not the most targeted traffic you can achieve, but if you are ranking #1 for single words or even 2 word pharases then usually we are pretty happy. I personally have very few keyword that I rank in the top 10 for, but 2 and three word phrases are usually pretty easy to obtain. I another reason You can tell it is really searched for a lot is from Adwords. I had to turn off that single word because it was clicked on so muuch, way more then any other phrase I adveritise.

It was not targeted, but if I ranked in the top 10 for it I would be thrilled to get all of that Traffic with natural resutls.