Hello all, For the past 3 month I tried to better understand Google behavior, but now I am amazed. My site, Free Software Downloads Archive is 5 months old and for the past 2 months my traffic was somewhere at 350 visitors /day. I continued my link campaign and 1 week ago my traffic got a boost up to 1500 v/day. 2 days ago, my site was down for 6 hours due to hosting company, the worst one ever, GoDaddy. Today, my traffic went to 80/day suddenly. Can someone tell me why? By the way, when my traffic went to 1500, all of my pages were out of the supplemental index so it seems normal to me. But what now? Was I penalized for my site being down?
From my understanding, the sandbox effect can last anywhere up to one year, so you may still a bit more waiting to do.
Yes, I agree with you. But I come up with good backlinks, my pages were out of the supplemental index, my traffic got higher and from out of nowhere I am down, real down now. It is very strange.
Your new links could have been sandboxed, so initially they gave you a boost in traffic but then google sandboxes them to make sure your not spamming. This can also happen if you build links at a high rate, and if the links are linking from non-relevant themes of your site, and you are not building fresh content on your site on a regular basis, this can be the cause. I don't think a short downtime could have caused that traffic drop, however anything is possible.
Sandboxed links? This is strange. I didn't build links at high rate and all of them were from sites with related content, but I have to admit, all of them were from pages with high PR. Before the boost I had 350 v/day and I though this was my value for the moment (it lasted for almost 2 months). After the boost finished Google shut me down and I have only 150/day , but google sends them for strange keywords. So maybe I am sanboxed. I hope after this testing I will be back at at least what I had before the boost.
This is real madness. After 2 days I was back on 1700 and I was really glad. But it lasted only 2-3 days, until this morning when I am again at 150. I really don't get it.
If your traffic is coming only from Google, you're going to suffer every time they change their algorithm. On the contrary if a lot of visitors bookmark your site you won't loose that much traffic suddenly.
One of my sites have gone down by 30 positions today, I don't know why as I havn't used any unorthodox techniques.
Today i was dropped again for one of my sites. I think this is the 3 or 4 times in 2 months. I am getting use to it now. Normally the traffic comes back after a few days for this site. For my other sites i dont get google traffic from begin of april anymore. There is not a lot what i can do then keep building backlinks and update my websites. Google is in power of my sites and many others
i've noticed that in matter of month, sites who i think deserves to be on top of results rotates, any idea?
Indeed, it's better to have more traffic from bookmarks than from Google, but it's hard to achieve that. It's not easy at all. I will do my best to provide good content and bring something new, but unfortunately my site have the same content with many others.
No one understands googles black magic. At one point a very small blog of mine with nearly no incoming links listed higher in google for a wordpress fix than the official wordpress site. At the time my blog was ~6 months old.
Almost. It keeps you going for couple of weeks and then the new links came in. You get a boost then get down, then a smaller boost and down again until the boost will be much smaller but constant. That's the new value the site have.
The google dance is just weird like that. Your site may disappear until the end of the dancing. It may wait to re-index your site. The googlebot cannot be predicted. If it's sandboxed, yes it can take up to a year and sometimes you have to e mail google yourself to request that it be taken out.