3 year old site in sandbox?

Can anyone shed some light on this for me. My 3 year old website, that was doing quite well for some time, just landed in the sandbox. Everything that I have read has stated that if it were a penalty, that I would not show up at all in google any more, but all of my terms are still in the 100-200 range and my PR bar is still showing 5. If it was a penalty, shouldn't it be greyed out?

So if it is not a penalty, why after 3 years would I be in the sandbox?

Has this happened to anyone else?

 

There is a difference between a "penalty" and being banned.

Did you make any major changes like adding a bunch of IBLs?

 

I still have 12,000 pages indexed but none of my keywords are in the top 100 anymore.

If is is a penalty, I don't know what may have caused it. I do everything legit as far as I know.

 

it's most likely something technical within your site.. i wouldn't put much thought into the sandbox theory in this case.

 

What I am most worried about, is because I don't know what caused the penalty, I don't know what to correct. So if I can't fix it, will I ever get rid of the penalty or will I just get hit with it again once the time is up and my site is released.

 

Which site is it?

 

looking at some of you sig domains they all do not redirect between www non www so the result of linking to both versions can be duplication.

G treats these as seperate domains... they do have a db or so but it's not reliable.

It's a potential that you compete with yourself.

Expat

 

Hi FTEGal,

My website has escaped from Google Sandbox after 2,5 months was in it.
If our site is in Google Sandbox, we must do some actions to escape faster.

What I did last time to escape:
1. Change my web layout
2. Add web content, at least twice a week
3. Submit articles to article directories
4. Check my back links. If there are some websites banned by Google and they link to our webs, they can cause our webs to be banned too (or to be sandboxed). Delete them.

If a site was banned, it be greyed out at the Google PageRank toolbar. Most SEOs call this "grey barred".

What can cause your web to be banned:

1. Hidden Text. It is text that users can't see when they visit to your webpages. Some webmasters will do this so that they can add keywords throughout their webpage without it interferring with what the visitors actually see.

2. Alt Image Tag Spamming. People will try to cram keywords into their websites, allowing search engine to see their keywords, but not allowing visitors to notice any difference in their website.

3. Meta Tag Stuffing. People throw in thousands of the same exact keyword into their meta tags.

4. Title Tag Stuffing. You only need to include your keyword(s) one time in your Title Tag, don't repeat your keyword(s).

Btw, don't submit to Social Bookmarking too much - just 3 social bookmarkers per day (and don't tagging too much keywords - maximum 5 keywords).

Hope this helps. Good luck !

MES

 

i think it is not a sandbox it may be punishment by google

 

Maybe a site thats linking to your got banned. Check all your inbound links

 

Hi Sell,

I think you are right. A few weeks ago I deleted some "bad" inbound links. After doing this I got a better rank in Google's SERP.

 

does your site automatically go in the sandbox as soon as it's created?

 

3 year old site in sandbox? maybe duplicet content