Return of the Google Sandbox
Its been a while since one of my affiliate marketing sites disappeared from the SERPS, or maybe its just been a while since I noticed it happen! I recently added about 30 pages to a new site that had only about five pages on it already. I also submitted the website to a couple of social bookmarking sites and wrote a few articles and submitted them to a directory. Before doing this the site was on the bottom half of page one for three of the main keywords I was targeting it at. This sounds ok but in reality it was only getting about 10 hits per day and had made only one sale.
I guess that this surge in content has brought the site to Google’s attention and as it is a fairly new site it got sandboxed. In the old days this used to fill me with dread but now I am more relaxed about it and hopefully it should return to the SERPS in a better position than before it got sandboxed.
Fingers crossed….
One of my good earners has fallen back from position 4 on page 1 all the way to page 4! It was one of my oldest sites and with good, unique content… I’m hoping this one comes back!
I’ve noticed a few sites moving around in the SERPS lately, might be related!
I’ve got a site that will be 1st for up-to a week at a time then drop down to page 10 for a few weeks. It’s 7 months old now and has been doing this for about 6 months, with a 2 month gap in the middle where it was on page 10 for ages.
Google sure don’t like making it easy to work them out!
That sounds annoying. Are you still adding links to it and adding content while this is going on?
I stopped adding links and content after a while to see what difference it made. The pattern stayed the same though. I’m still hoping it might settle down eventually.
My site in a not very competitive niche was no. 3 for about 6 months. I didn’t really add anything for ages (apart from product price/availability) and it didn’t move. But one day it disappeared totally. Not moved down a few places as you might expect, but gone altogether (to p19 I think). That’s what I hate most!
By it’s own admission Google made me number 3 and then one day it thinks no, I meant page 19!
It’s a funny old game. Makes you wonder how Google ‘works’ and this does give credit to the idea its all a bit random, espcially when it comes to the smaller sites.
My site has disapeared again so its time on page one was short lived. Hopefully it will be back again.
New sites always bounce like crazy. Keep building quality content and links.
I’ve got a blog that is 1-2 months old and every post is optimized for a different keyword in a competitive niche. I only have about 10-15 posts on it, and I had 4 posts that were on page 1 of google. Then I had 4-5 that were on page 2. Now all of them are gone, but I’m still ranked on yahoo,msn, and bing. Do you have any idea how long this lasts? And should I just continue to create and promote content as usual?
Chris
Who knows it might come back on it’s own or you might have to drag it back.
Was it making money before it dissapeared? If so then I’d keep working on it.
The site I mentioned came back a month later so was ‘sandboxed’ for 3 months in total. After that comment, I did revamp the site, putting each product on its own page and creating a news section, but I can’t be sure that brought it back. It’s now no 1 though! And I add new content at least once a week.
The first time around (when the site was 1 month old) it was out for a month. So I guess you could be looking at the same. You did well to get one page 1 so quick, if it made money then I’d keep updating.