Jason asked a very interesting and valid question as follow-up to our first post (3 Reasons People Fail To Make Money With Keywords), and I thought that it was important to answer the question for everyone. I get similar questions all the time by email, and the question relates very much to a concept that everyone needs to understand. Here it is:
I’ve been doing what the three of you (court, Vic, Griz)have preached and was up to spot #2 in Google for my keyword.
I continue to gain varied anchored links and now I have dropped to PAGE 5 of Google!
I’m extremely frustrated and I firmly believe that no one understands Google.
Jason I would actually need a little more information to answer this question with 100% certainty. There is more than one scenario that could have caused this to happen. What I’m going to do is lay out the different scenarios for everyone. I can’t determine which one caused your drop without knowing more about your site, but you should be able to tell on your own based on the ’symptoms’. Here are the potential reasons:
1 – Google Sandboxing
The Google Sandbox still exists and what you have described is classic ’sandboxing’. When you get sandboxed, you usually drop in rankings from one day to the next with no apparent reason. If this is a sandboxing, your ranking just plain isn’t going to improve for at least a while.
Fortunately for you, the sandboxing period doesn’t seem to last as long as it used to. For me, it’s only been lasting a month or two as of late. It seems to help if you add content more often to sandboxed sites, which means that this tends to bring them out of the box more quickly.
The only real way to tell if it’s a sandboxing for sure is to add more content and links over the next two weeks. If you aren’t able to move up in the rankings during that time period, this is your most likely problem.
If you’re boxed, it isn’t terrible news. Within a few short months you’ll be back, and your rankings will then be a lot more stable.
2 – Google Shuffle
Lately Google has been playing around with something that has been causing some sites to drop a few pages in the search results. If you have a network of sites that has any size at all, you have been seeing this happen for months now.
What happens is your site will drop 4 or 5 pages in the rankings for a couple days, and then it will be right back. I have been seeing this happen for about 6 months now and honestly, it isn’t anything to worry about. If Google does something permanent, we’ll figure out what they did and then move forward.
You’ll know that this is what’s happening to you if your rankings are restored within a few days.
3 – Something Changed On/Around Your Site
There are a bunch of different changes that can cause you to lose rankings temporarily. For example, you may have lost an important link. Maybe you got a link trade from a authoritative site who cheats. They may have taken your link down or they could have nofollowed it.
Additionally, people that use blogs sometimes mix up their content without knowing it. When they create new posts that appear on their homepage, they forget that their keywords need to remain there. People tend to push their rankings right off their home pages without realizing it. Unless you have serious keyword authority, your keywords need to be there so be careful when you create new content.
Jason quickly I want to address your belief that no one understands Google. Honestly if you feel like you don’t understand them, you’re not working enough sites. When things at Google change, it’s actually pretty easy to see. I can tell you with absolute certainty that both Vic (Make Money Online with Blogger Unleashed and The Affiliate Academy) and Griz (How To Make Money Online for Beginners and Make Money Online Grizzly) understand Google at a world class level and honestly that’s why they both make bank online.
Nicely put Court. The Google Shuffle is something that really just showed up 2-3 updates back. It had me scratching my head at first but seems to be the new housecleaning method they are using. While the ins and outs of it remain unknown I noticed it started after the big paid links slap earlier in the year. It seems to be ongoing but they appear to target different sectors (niches) on a rotating basis. The MMO niche is now going through a second round of it at present whereas my fishing related niche went through it last month.
I have noticed a peculiar “tell” when it’s a shuffle as opposed to a penalty or loss of backlinks – the indicator is the sudden change in “total pages” listed in the serp’s. For instance I rank well for the term “how to make money” and the serp’s have listed “73,000,000″ total competing pages for this term for ages – at the moment that number has shot up to “83,000,000″ competing pages. “make money online” has gone from 33 million to 45 million and so on. I’m am waiting to see if these numbers drop back to the usual numbers (as a sign the shuffle is over) or if they remain as the new total.
In any event it appears that they are sweeping the net and including every possible page indexed for a particular term – ranking all the terms first by current posts – then they re-shuffle to add age, authority, backlinks etc. This means that a site can find itself ranking quite well based on new material for a few days and then gets shuffled back in the pack as the other factors are added in. What this means is that the top sites (pages) get dumped back for a few days while the new sites get sorted out and then they reclaim their former spots a few days later. This can happen on and off for a few weeks in the more competitive niches.
Keep in mind that this is only what I “think” I see happening based on only two shuffles in my main niche. I could be way off but the pattern appears to be there at the moment.
Deciphering G is always a matter of educated guessing and the more input from others helps to eliminate the wrong answers – we will never know all the right ones though.
All the best with this new venture Court and Mark.
Ok, so why does Google sandbox a website and how do we avoid it? It sounds like SEO purgatory.
I’ve been building links on a certain forum and whenever I add a link to my signature, it adds it to all of them. Suddenly when I did that, my business site shot up to #4 in Google for a certain key word. Since then it has gradually been sinking down about a page per week. Is this normal?
Thanks,
Tim
Download free software if that’s what you want to be called, generally the best way to avoid sandbox is to get some very high quality links from the get go. If you get a whole bunch of crap links right away, you are sure to hit sandbox. In my experience the best way to start any new site is with targeted high quality links. Then if you want to add crappy links later go ahead.
Grizz, as you know one of my money makers was recently caught up in this “shuffle” gone for days on and off for weeks and then it came back , actually in a better position than before,
Sandbox, I have been successful as Justin said with spoon feeding new sites quality links at first and letting the site kind of establish itself. In other words one BMD run early on and you are going to the beach.
Court,
In your email #2 you are talking about the changes you made to the site you bought and that after doing some internal links you also “created some external links to these pages, using article distribution and by creating a small network of sites.”
Can you please elaborate on just what “a small network of sites” is? What exactly are you talking about here…Squidoo, Huppages, blogger blogs or what?
Thanks.
Bruce
@Justin,
Thank you. I should note that getting poor quality links wasn’t my intention. Actually, getting links for all of my previous posts wasn’t my intent at all. I just wanted to put into my signature on a forum that I frequent that is quite relevant to my day job and my first blog.
I have been trying to build good quality links fro the get-go. It just happened that when I changed my signature it changed them on all of the 270 posts that I have made. At least if boosted me up for a little while. Now the process of building more links continues.
Thanks,
Tim
I’ve found that the fasted path “out” of the sandbox is to do just as you’ve prescribed: Add content and backlinks!
Oh, and it’s been my observation that when I target “long tail” keywords, the sandbox effect is definitely less severe than when I target “hot” keywords.
I think it is just shuffling. One of my new sites without any backlinks yet got Google traffic for about 4 days continuously from US and then stopped. That site is nowhere visible here in India. One of my posts which does not appear anywhere on Google here in India, ranks at the second position for the keyword in Philippine data center. Oh yes, google indexed all my new sites without any backlinks yet. I always leave the site with one post and wait for it to be indexed before adding links.
Hi Court,
Ditto on the request for details about “small network of sites.”
What is the best way to get a site that has been completely deindexed by Google back into the index? I keep reading where people have spent time link building, even completely starting over with entirely different content on the domain and months later still not indexed. What’s your suggestions?
Thanks,
Sonia
Sonia if you’ve been deindexed you need to do a reinclusion request with Google Webmaster Tools. However, there’s probably a reason why you got deindexed. If this is the case, you won’t get back in and you’ll need to start over with a new domain.
I’ve never given this a try, but I think it’s about time I do.
OK, well I think I did this by accident. I was doing so well, following everything you guys suggest (you and Griz) my site was up, then I added new content (related to my keyword, but not my keyword) used UAW and a few other backlink techniques and I got sandboxed. Now I have lost of links out there because of using UAW redirecting to my site with unrelated keywords. Is there anyway to fix that? If I just start plugging in new content related again to my keywords, I should be ok, right? If not, what do I do?
Thanks for your help!