Hey All- Our company website has been online for about a year. After some serious SEO screwups less than 5% of our pages are in the main index (the number varies from week to week but rarely is more than 10% and averages about 5%). We're at the end of our rope, we've tried everything we can think of and everything our SEO consultants can think of and the only conclusion we can come to is that Google clearly hates us for our past indiscretions (2000+ pages with a duplicate title, submitting bad site maps, etc.). We see no light at the end of the tunnel. How feasible would it be to move all of our content to a new domain, strip it off the old domain (so there's no duplicate content), and start over? Would Google know or would it give us a fresh start? Could we see results faster than laying around in the sandbox indefinitely? I should also say that if we do not see a marked increase in our traffic in the next 3 months the company will probably close, so time is of the essence. Thanks for the help. /sebas
You could make new site and leave old one up. If the old site finaly starts to rank well then link it to new one.
i think there is nothink which is going to effect the sandbox. there is only one think to get out domains from sandbax. it's waiting and continue to work on your site
Have you tried contacting Google and asking one of their engineers if there are any problems with your website? They should hopefully inform you as to what is causing the penalties and allow you to rectify them.
My 2 cents redesign your site (with the same domain) based on KISS principle and exclude almost all of the SEO tactics for now except meta tags. Build a sitemap, before submitting to google, ensure it is working properly. Create quality content for humans, do some normal link building and till your site starts to rank, just use some PPC advertisements. A month or two down the line there should be an improvement.
Could you PM me the url? There are probably a few underlying on/off page factors holding your site back. If you don't address these problems then simply switching your domain will not solve anything.
You should use alternate methods of getting traffic. Such as paid advertisement, submission of posts in forums and articles directories. You can also place paid links on high traffic sites.
You should use alternate methods of getting traffic. Such as paid advertisement, submission of posts in forums and articles directories. You can also place paid links on high traffic sites.
For terminology's sake, lets not call this the sandbox. The sandbox is a term for the problems new sites in competitive niches have in ranking. The sandbox may be part of your problem, but the main issue seems to me to be that your site got a penalty from using outdated black hat SEO-tactics. This is one of the few cases where starting over just might be the best option, but contacting google is what I'd personally try first. If you do start over, that would put your site IN the sandbox all over, but it would get you out of all the red flags your site has in its history. It's certainly something to consider. The option other people came up with to just create the new site and let the old site just sit there (all clean and proper) is also a decent one. Just develop a new site, let the old one age a bit and see which one does best a year or so from now. As you can see I'm on the fence on this one. Part of that is that I don't know how bad your situation is, having not seen the site. I'd like to know the outcome one way or another a year from now as well. Anyhow, the option of just building cheap links from the type of directory usually advertised here on DP is NOT your answer. I'm going to assume you have done proper on topic quality link-building already. If not: do that.
One more thing: your business should NOT, I repeat should NOT be dependent on serp position entirely. You probably can't get out of the sandbox in three months anyhow. A new site would not be out of the sandbox in three months either. So you need other traffic sources - like adwords, proper pr etc. Get some real, good, quality marketing going that fits your business niche and the core qualities of whatever it is you have to offer clients.
We had a section (folder) of our site (not a whole site)that was dropped from Google SERPS. After changing whatever we could to hopefully correct whatever it was that put them down, and waiting and hoping for a few months that they would reappear, we decided to put them in a new folder and put them up, and they were in the SERPS and fine in a short time. So it may well work- in time- for you with a new site. Of course, with a new site, it would have to go through the whole process of any new site, and may or may not be at a useful level in 3 months. How useful wherever it gets is, also depends what you need the site to be doing... is it bringing lots of visitors to hopefully see your products or actual online sales? Or is it making money from clicks of Adsense ads etc? Naturally, in making the new site it would be better not to have duplicate content to the old one, (or you may never rank) so you should either create new content, so that you can "keep trying" with the old one, or take the old one down and just have a go with the new one. I would tend to worry that with how long it has been "sandboxed" or whatever you want to call it, that your old site may never recover... or it may be a long time and a lot of work. Have you submitted a reinclusion request? If you think you've fixed whatever the problem was, this may work, but I've heard many people say it's done no good for them. Good luck!
Our site uses java script navigation with encoded urls in order to prevent the crawlers from accessing a percentage of our site - this way we attempt to prevent these supplemental automatically generated pages from diluting the PR of our well written pages. We saw in other domains of ours occasions where the Google Bot actually crawls through JS code and even Ajax - does it mean that the flow of PR could still be diluted by the above mentioned JS encrypted navigation?
Let me get this straight, first you impair the ability of google bot to easily crawl your website and then complain it doesn’t index’s your site properly?