Posts Tagged ‘sandbox’

What To Do When Your Site Gets SANDBOXED

March 18th, 2009  |  by Court  |  Published in Link Building  |  42 Comments

Many of you have been pretty interested about my last 30 articles in 30 days experiment. I took a newer and weaker site this time and did quite a bit of article distribution for links using Unique Article Wizard.

I’ve seen quite a bit of movement in the search engine results, but the problem is that the site can’t seem to break the top 50 for anything. You’re in a much better position when you move up from position 400+ to position 50, but you still aren’t going to get any traffic. You never see anything significant until you break the top 10 and you see a huge jump once you break the top 5.

The experiment ended a few weeks ago but to be sure that being sandboxed was the issue, I did some testing. It definitely felt like the site was sandboxed but the only way to really tell is to do more work and wait. I added some good links that should have pushed the site up into the top 50 for some keywords and I got no improvement. When this happens it tells you that you’re boxed.

In the case of this site, I can see that it was already boxed when I bought it because it gets about exactly the same traffic now as it did when I acquired it. If the experiment had gotten it sandboxed, the existing traffic would have gone down and that didn’t happen.

How To Deal With Getting Sandboxed

Usually what you have to do to get out of the sandbox is prove to Google that the site is going to keep getting fresh content, which means you need to post more often. You also want to scale back so that you’re adding single links only – that means no new blogroll links and no article-distribution links. You probably want to post like three times per week if on a site that’s in the box – this seems to get the site out more quickly.

Unique Article Wizard can still be pretty effective but you have to change how you use it on a site that’s in the sandbox. What I would do to help a site like this is create some stronger, single links on EzineArticles or Squidoo. The EzineArticles and Squidoo pages link to your site and you use UAW to strengthen your Ezine and Squidoo pages. This will help your rankings and will make it so that you aren’t using article links while you’re boxed – remember that you want to add only single links if you’re boxed.

Formula For Dealing With The Sandbox

  • Post three or four time per week, at least
  • Add single links only
  • Strengthen single links by pointing links at them

Explanation of Google Sandboxing and Ranking Drops

November 7th, 2008  |  by Court  |  Published in SEO  |  13 Comments

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.