Hello all, My site www.softarea51.com is quite new. Not older than 3 months. I think it is a very good site and I am trying to improve it every day, but I had some problems with Google. I had like 20-30 unique visitors/day in the first 3 weeks, than I went to 200, 300 and the best was 680. That was quite nice. One day, suddenly traffic dropped to 20 again and I was receiving visitors only for some strange keywords. It was clear, I was in sandbox. I had some errors on my site and I think I discovered them too late. Do you think this can be the reason? Ok. After 1-2 weeks in sandbox I came back clean but traffic went only to 480. No more. Then stabilized at 350. Last week because, I had again errors because of the hosting company (GoDaddy). Now I am again in sandbox. Is this possible? To be in sandbox more than once? Will this affect my site permanently?
Sounds like your keywords werent sandboxed and it was an issue with your hosting. I would forget about the sandbox and focus on getting your site up and working consistently.
On the contrary, I think my keywords were sandboxed, but only after I got those errors. Each time I have errors, after a week or so I am sanboxed. Of course, I understand Google when it crawls my site and finds errors and I hope I will be able to upgrade my hosting soon. The only question is that I am worried because this is the second time is happening and I hope Google will not increase the sanbox time.
They werent sandboxed. It doesnt work like that at all. If they were you wouldnt get traffic for them for quite a few months. Just look at the competition for your keywords you are talking about. If its not competitive then you definetly werent. Server issues have alot to do with your rankings. If you your site goes down then Google will see it as being gone and remove you from the index. When it comes back up and Google sees it again then you can find your site in the SERPs.
It seems I didn't understood the sandbox theory. For many keywords I was in page 1 or 2, now I am in page 40. How do you call that? Should I wait months in this state to be able to say I am in the sandbox?
The sandbox theory is about how new sites in competitive niches take a long time to rank. They sometimes do well in the first week, but tank after that. Your site doesn't fit the theory mainly because you've already ranked consistently for significant phrases for more than just the first week. The label 'sandbox' isn't what you should worry about anyhow. What you should be concerned with is how to get consistent rankings. I'm with Aaron on this: get good hosting. Your site having been down is a major block to your ranking well. Make sure that issue isn't repeated. Do other SEO stuff like social bookmarking, getting relevant links, good on-page SEO etc.