Buried in sand and no way out

or have I been banned?

[buksida]

I have read through the extensive and informative threads on the Google sandbox here but am still so frustrated that I'm beginning to think Google has banned my site.

A few details: the site is around 8 months old and has 900 pages of content most of which is original. It has a PR5 and gets about 6,000 visitors per month, mostly from my link marketing efforts. It is number one in Yahoo, MSN and Altavista for the name of the site and domain.

It gets less than 25 visitors from Google per month. It is not in the top 100 for a search on the name of the site and domain in Google. A lot of the sites that do appear are ones linking to me using these terms.

I think G has banned me but how can I find out? If I'm not banned then what on earth can I do to get Google to rank me? Googlebot visits daily but obviously takes no heed of what it sees.

Very frustrated!

[tedster]

If you are getting 25 visitors a month from Google, then you are clearly not banned -- if you were the number would be zero, right? So it does sound more like a sandbox scenario. There's lots of frustrated posts about that, as you mention, but no solid answers. And that's the way Google intends it to be, I'm sure.

So I'd say be glad for what you do have and keep building your business. Some day, Google may give you a present, and you can then consider it as a present and be grateful. You can't force anyone to give you a present, after all ;)

[netmeg]

There's no good answer. One of my sites was like that for over two years, and then suddenly with the last update, it shot to the top. I was convinced it was being penalized, and Google swore it wasn't, and it wasn't a new site either (it'd been up for at least four or five years). It went from being in the index but not coming up for ANY search string to coming up for EVERY search string, literally overnight.