I recently came across this thing Google's -950 Penalty in this if your site ranks Rank 1 for some Keyword in Google, then your site's Rank Will Drop down to 950 Position in Google i.e, If you site is on 1st Page for some Keyword it will drop down to 10th Page Wtf!!! And this happened to me My Site : www.bannedstuff.net was Ranked 1 in Google for the Keyword Banned Stuff (i.e Page 1) and now its on 10th Page WTF!! and this all happened because of the Hosting Down Time hope to get the Rank Back Would love your thoughts on this Penalty of Google
Sandbox - If your site is new or is SEOd for on-page optimization, then you will see you site ranking higher on Google (for the targetted keyword - and become happy ) But within few days/weeks, it will disappear from the SERP for few days/weeks and then again on top.
and what if i show you couple sites , getting huge traffic within first month of launch, having onpage & offpage seo done.
Actually just confirmed with my friend Sandbox Effect is for new Sites but this thing is happening to old sites too @ COL http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3215939.htm There you go There is 1 more error called -30 Penalty where your site drops to 30 Positions in Google
Thats what is called Sandbox... Your new site will be up for weeks or months.. I told what I knew, You better know about it as you are the SEO expert.
google indexed 43 pages from your site... Does your site contains more than that?? Better to use sitemap.xml . I had the same issue ,and after I updated my sitemap.xml ,both google index pages and traffic increased...
Might just be temporary - part of the Google-Dance.. Or, might also be an MSSA Penalty. Give it a week or two and hopefully it will be back to normal, or better. How long was your site down?
i have seen this, it affects a lot of my sites. but then it dosenot matters much as i keep optimizing a lof of keywords, so if one of them are down the others are still on top. though i think i usually get the 30 penalty, where my site goes to 2-3 page at times. perhaps we should make the site load faster if the site is on top for a perticular keyword, that might help
I have noticed it too in previous couple of months ... I noticed it for 'old' sites not 'new' sites which are hit by sandbox. I noted couple of points about it 1) Site was ranking good based on previous link buildings but for last six months to one year not enough fresh link building was done. 2) If you start getting quality backlinks this penalty proves to be 'temporary'. Hopefully more thoughtful comments will enlighten this issue
To Amit Patel: Yeah? Bring it on, and I'll show you 10x of whatever figure you show me of sites THAT ARE EXPERIENCING THE GOOGLE SANDBOX EFFECT. IT
Its not the sandbox. More than likely its just a normal thing. Right now I have 2 sites that I notice that dropped its first page rankings and disappeared from the SERPS. This happens every once in awhile and its nothing to worry about if havent been naughty. Just give it some time and it will come back. Can take awhile though. Think the longest Ive seen is around 1 month.
Thats why its very important to have multiple sites and never rely only on one. This stuff tends to happen every now and again and if all you have is one site it can hurt you monthly income pretty bad.
one of my sites (11 months old web site) has sandbox effect for last 1 month. i believe sandbox effect is not related with the site age
If you are ferring to the 950 penalty from referred from webmasters world. It does not equal the sandbox effect, it maybe a part of the so called sandbox effect but it is ,,, err.. the -950 penalty. Well it may not be precisely the -950 penalty but there abouts. Its something that some webmasters have noticed .. a penalty that is not a site wide penalty like the -30 penalty but rather for a specific search term. Say you rank 2nd one day for a search for 'keyword1 keyword2' and 5th for keyword2 keyword1' The next day you could be rank 952 for 'keyword1 keyword2' and 5th for 'keyword2 keyword1' After the penalty has been llifted you could be first page again for both. This is the 950 penalty as first claimed.