Google Sandbox… Yeah, It’s Real
Google Sandbox, Is It Real?
I’ve gone back and forth with the Google sandbox. I read up on this from various articles online and in many ecourses over the past year. I was leaning towards the Google sandbox not being real. I didn’t have any real proof.
Oh, Hell Yeah, the Google Sandbox is Real
Unfortunately, I learned the hard way that the Google sandbox is definitely real. Earlier this year, I wrote in an online journal at a forum I frequent that I was desperately trying to figure out how to make money. My goal was to make $100/day. This was farfetched for someone who hasn’t made decent money online in quite some time.
The only real proof I had that I could make money was a Christmas site I built back in November of 2010. I literally registered it in October and put up the site with a couple of posts on it at the end of November. By the end of December, I made a few hundred dollars in profit from Amazon sales. I was psyched! It wasn’t a lot of money but it told me that I was on the right path.
I left the site alone for several months after that to pursue other online things. It was getting about 120-160 unique visitors just sitting there with no promotion.
In the summer time, I decided to start adding new posts to the Christmas site. I redesigned the WordPress theme and layout. I also beefed the site up with more posts. I was aiming to turn it from a small site into an authority site.
Hit My Biggest Day in October
I was excited on Oct. 22 when I hit my biggest day in unique visitors… 222! That was a lot for me. The site had never seen that many visitors ever before that. I was excited for Christmas to get here. I just knew that good things were coming.
Then Shit Hit the Fan
The day after my biggest day, my traffic literally plummeted to just over 50 unique visitors. I was in a state of panic. I didn’t know what had happened. My first thought was that my hosting company let me down. I had moved from Hostgator to Host the Name a few months prior because they were a lot cheaper. I talked to support and they said the server was up this whole time. I was definitely confused.
I started digging around my traffic stats for the 22nd and realized that Google bot no longer was listed. Usually I’d see it visit my site several times a day. I also noticed that I wasn’t getting any search engine traffic from Google. My first thought was that I was hit with the infamous Google sandbox. And I was right.
I typed in site:(my domain name) in google search box and my domain was not listed anywhere. It proved to me that my site was completely deindexed. I searched high and low on different websites about people’s sites getting deindexed. I bought several ebooks from the Warrior Forum regarding the Panda update.
Clean Up Time
Ok, after reading some ebooks and articles about the Panda update, I went over to Google Webmaster Tools and studied the crawl errors that Google listed. I cleaned up the 404s that Google found and deleted a few plugins from the website that were causing problems. After all that, I nervously sent a message to Google for a site reconsideration. What this is is basically asking Google to manually look over the site and see if the site is worthy enough to be reindexed.
I seriously had a hard time sleeping the next few nights. I visited the Google webmaster forum and read posts about many people crying about their sites getting seriously penalized or worst, deindexed like mine. Others responded to the posts by suggesting why some sites got deindexed. Others also said that it could take from a few weeks to a month or so to hear back if one were to send in for a reconsideration. That made me nervous because Christmas was coming back and I didn’t want to miss the shopping season.
The Google Sandbox Response
Surprisingly, I received not 1, not 2, but 3 identical and oh so generic responses by Google’s reconsideration team 5 days after I sent a message to them. Basically I was told that my site was still not worthy enough for a reindex. I was devastated… but only for a few hours.
After banging my head against the wall, it was time to take action. I didn’t want the Google sandbox to be the end of my site so I spent the next few days holed up in my home office revamping my entire site from the ground up. I wrote, rewrote, and rewrote every single post. I also beefed up each post with more content infused with my personality. I got rid of the excessive affiliate links and got rid of a plugin that plastered tags all over each post. I assumed that Google would think it’s keyword stuffing.
Just a few days after I got rejected by Google, I bravely sent in for a 2nd reconsideration. It was just as nerve wracking as the first time. Even after I sent in for the reconsideration, I second guessed myself and beefed up my content even more. I was so nervous.
Each day I kept watching my stats to look for traffic increases. I was seeing Google Bot hanging out at the site several times each day again. And then 4 days into my excruciating wait, I saw that someone had arrived at my site from Google Australia! I was cautiously excited. Then another from Google UK. On the 5th day of my wait, I received a message from Google saying that my site was getting reindexed. I was extremely excited. All that blood, sweat and tears was finally paying off.
Google Sandbox, What I Learned
What I learned is that you can’t fool Google. At least not for very long. I wasn’t trying to do anything shady. But my site was not of high quality in Google’s eyes. What got my site out of the Google sandbox was probably a combination of original content that was 600-1300 words per post, very few outbound links, no posts with a buttload of tags (may look like keyword stuffing), disclaimer pages up on the site, and some outbound links to other authority sites.
I take away from this experience knowing that whatever sites I build in the future will be based on the Christmas site that suffered from the Google sandbox but made it out alive a week before Black Friday ;).
The Christmas site has made several sales this November, including 10 sales in one day a couple days ago. My highest day so far has been 243 unique visitors. It’s going to be a good Christmas this year.
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