Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
These potentially have you in a prolonged suspense, review and release period. Then, if you haven't fixed things, maybe you are recaptured and given another good sandboxing for being a repeat "offender" and so on, until you're "gone" for ever increasing longer periods.
But since those earlier reports of "sandboxing" , Big Daddy has come and gone, and maybe new things can be added to the reason for a drop to the "box".
Many "repaired" sites are feeling the effects of delayed recovery, and several are reporting "dampened results", consistant with sandboxing symptoms . That is, if they ever return!
What what are you experiencing, and what are the prospects for recovery?
Maybe our good friends at the Plex can give us some insight into whether new features have been added to the sandbox routine, and what the effects and expectancies are.
Rules pretty well still apply; if you create a new site, expect 8-14 months of waitning for an appropriate stable listing in Google.
Speed up the wait by gradually building and extending and adding; not only content, but quality links (eg from quality directories).
Slow things down by adding a bunch of non-conforming redirects (ie other than 301s); or adding millions of machine generated pages, or clone pages.
Or rebuilding, renaming and otherwise becoming "a new site" all over again, which, surprisingly, may put you back to hour zero. All over again.
Additionally, and high risk activities in a new site become 'maximum risk'; joining link exchanges, for example, is SEO suicide for a new site. Joining spam directories makes Google laugh so much, you'll probably get delisted.
Etc., etc., All perfectly logical stuff, no tricks or mirrors required.
[edited by: Quadrille at 4:13 pm (utc) on Sep. 29, 2006]
It's all part of of Google working out the relativity of a new site, which is probably why sites that change a lot, or are complex, or break the rules tend to get it very badly.
Most of my sites are plain vanilla html, I never exchange links, but I do progressively add content - and so far all have had smooth beginnings (touch wood!). Except, weirdly, a couple of subdomains that just didn't quite settle down.
Sites can get indexed pretty quickly; the 'sandbox' is when their position in serps is unreliable; some sites get nicely indexed, sometimes too nicely, then disappear completely for a while, or zoom up and down. Once the 'unpredictability stops, you are 'out' of the sandbox.
Could this be the reason why I'm seeing a big reduction in pages returned in searches?
For example, two weeks ago, my main key phrase used to return 140 million ago with my homepage ranking #10. Now the same search returns 70+ million only with me ranking #7...
Also in another more competitive category, a two word key phrase used to give 260 million pages. Now it returns only approx 190 million.
Do not forget, that Google has many datacenters, some experimental, so comparing a small number of searches is often unreliable.
Plus, of course, the srps change all the time - it may be a plain old fashioned change in your position!
If you maintain a spreadsheet of your key searches by date, a picture of what is happening soon builds up; and if you use Google's online spreadsheat, it isn't a big chore.
[edited by: tedster at 12:48 am (utc) on Sep. 30, 2006]
That`s why our expectations are down at Zero and all ambitions have been shoved into the dustbin. Perhaps another search engine or directory will take over the market with better results.
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