My site is around 3 years old and was ranking on 2nd page for most of its keywords. Home page was showing for the keywords. Suddenly 2 days ago my site's ranking gone down to 50th page. I have never used any unethical way to promote my site. I cannot make out the reason for this drastic change. Is this a Sandbox effect? As far as I know Sandbox is for new sites doing spam. But my site is neither new nor I was doing any spam. My site is hosted on shared server. Is this the reason Google did so? What exactly is Sandbox effect? How can I check what is the reason behind this change? Please help.
Fluctuation of ranking is normal in Google. If you didn't do any change on website pages it will be back soon dont worry !
Right, there would not be a sandbox for a 3 years old site. And, I think you might add fresh contents to your homepage if you want a long term high SERP.
Lately, many other people reported fluctuations in Google SERP positions. Though from page 2 to page 50 it's a big difference. I don't think it's sandbox effect.
I think PR is affected more than SERPs with sandboxing. Not sure about it though. One of my PR2 sites went down to PR0 almost 2 months ago, and till now it is PR0..I guess Google sandboxed it due to me submitting content to social networking sites only, and not anywhere else. But it still comes on the same pages for its keywords.
And many of them got their site rankings back within two weeks. Same was happened to me. My site homepage was gone down to 50th page for all keywords but after two weeks I got my all rankings back. @OP Wait for Two or three weeks.. You will be back.
Exactly, your domain is aged and would not fall victim to the sandbox. Have you hired anyone to do any SEO for you recently? Check your backlinks to see if any banned or adult domains are linking to you.
Put this in Google search site:www.mysite.com Change mysite.com to your URL. If you are in the sandbox, they won't be able to find your site. What you are describing happens to people I help all of the time. Recently, I had a customer's site on page 1 in Google and Yahoo for 2 different key words. Suddenly, most of those listings just seemed to vanish. Then, without making any changes, they suddenly reappeared. It sure makes you wonder what those folks are up to.
Hi, this problem is common and happens to the best of us. I have websites that get over 30k traffic which drop to 1-2k out of sudden luck, but since i'm familiar with this, I usually manage to work around it. Send me a PM with your website URL and some keywords that have dropped and I'll offer you a solution (hopefully).
Check if someone has copied your site by going to copyscape.com or searching yahoo for a sentence or two on your site.
Ozzie is correct, use copyscape first to verify all of your content is unique. I've heard of this happening recently to a lot of poorly backlinked websites. Just because you don't think you didn't do anything wrong doesn't mean you didn't. Also what types of link building campaigns were you using? Do you have any unique content on the website? Spun? Copied? I would recommend the following, Maintain the backlink velocity Update the content weekly Create manual 2.0s and bookmark with a proxy You'll get out of it just keep fighting!