Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Thank you.
The second thing I would do is check what pages come up when you do a search site:domain name see how many pages you have indexed... it could be that you are not sandboxed only not listed for whatever reason.
Use the google webmasters tool to see if they are reporting any errors with your site and create a google xml sitemap
Then wait and see if it helps...
Another reason this may happen is you suddenly got a whole bunch of links.... or you made a major change and google is checking you out...
good luck!
The site is now 7 years old, and yes about 2 years ago it was ranking for terms that are highly competitive. It seems in the last year or so it just slowly disappeared from the listings.
Semantics I know, and hopefully this response won’t start another endless “does the sandbox exist” thread, but I would reconsider using the term “sandboxed” for this situation. The reason I say this is that if your site was new, and had yet to rank for any main keywords, but does rank for some more obscure ones, I would recommend some actions to take to get out of this “sandbox” from which you have always been in. However, I don’t think any of those would help, and would be time, work and money down the drain.
The only results it appears for are the site name itself. Everything else, even longtail do not appear in the listings.
This description is more dire than being “sandboxed”, or even the dreaded 950 penalty.
If you were ranking two years ago for highly competitive terms, and then over this time slowly disappeared from the rankings you have a deteriorating situation being caused by something. You indicated you do have pages for “site:domain” but the real question is how many did you have at the peak ranking for this site, and how many do you have now? Another question to ask is what was the page rank for this site then, and what is it now, especially for interior pages?
I just don't see how it can take 2 years for them to figure out what is going on.
Unfortunately there is no one at Google trying to figure your situation out. I might try figuring things out by;
•Run the site; command and see if every page on your site has a unique title and meta description.
•Use the Yahoo site explorer and look into all of the sites linking to you and look for any odd ones, especially ones with many entries. (hundreds are not surprising)
•Grab some unique sentences from a bunch of pages on your site, place quotation marks around them and search for them in Google. See if there has been any mass copying of your content.
•Check your pages to make sure there are no Robots.tx issues
•Look at your site with different browsers, also turn off java script and look at it
•See if your site comes up both www and no www.
We're not a spammy site
I’m sure your intentions are pure, but that doesn’t mean something in your site hasn't tripped some sort of “spam” filter or penalty; don’t assume anything. Take a long hard look at your linking profile and practices, and see if there is any aggressive cross linking, or aggressive internal linking. Something seems to be sucking the life blood out of your site and dramatic or rapidly discounted page rank (i.e. discounted links) distribution can cause that.
Good luck and keep us posted on any findings.
Any other ideas? See, now I don't feel so bad - I've been bashing my head against the wall for months on this.
