disaster recovery measures

okay... so this update has been baptised with a name (though frankly I think Katrina or tsunami are way more apt than Jagger) and the latest news seems to indicate that the changes are here to stay. i've been thinking about migrating core content to a new domain name; i was planning to switch to a more search engine friendly URL anyway, and now seems as good a time as any, given that i hover between #240 and #250 for just about all keywords.

the problem is that i rank well on both Yahoo and MSN, and i do get a good amount of traffic from these, especially yahoo which seems to be popular with my target audience (perhaps because they travel a lot and use Y! for email).

anyway, my conundrum is that i need to transfer data to a new domain name and wait out the sandbox WITHOUT losing traffic from Y! and MSN. if i move everything and put up a link for visitors to click on, i won't lose any traffic coming straight at the front page, for sure, but what about searches for keywords tucked away in articles within the site?

i think i will do this: copy data over to NEW-DOMAIN.COM, essentially creating a mirror site. then put instructions in robots.txt to keep Y! and MSN out of NEW-DOMAIN.COM. meanwhile, on the robots.txt at OLD-DOMAIN.COM, i tell googlebot to get lost. this will spare me from the duplicate content penalty and i'm not losing out since OLD-DOMAIN.COM doesn't rank well on G for anything except the name of my site, anyway.

when NEW-DOMAIN.COM comes out of the sandbox, sometime in 2006, and a good number of backlinks have been established, i junk the robot files, get rid of the content on OLD-DOMAIN, and redirect 301 to NEW-DOMAIN.COM.

does this sound right? has anyone had to do this sort of thing before? i am venturing into new territory...

 

How bout just putting up a new domain and a few pages of unique content, getting backlinks, getting indexed, waiting out the sandbox, then move everything over?

 

p.s. of course, there is a risk NEW-DOMAIN.COM might get banned all over again. i guess i will be a little less aggressive SEO-wise, and shift even further towards the WH end of the scale. the only questionable thing i did was have a few links wrapped around tiny transparent gifs (pointing to other pages within the site and other domains i manage) but i never suspected G would be smart enough to pick those up. maybe i was wrong; matt mentions hidden links and i can't think of any other way to do hidden links that doesn't involve hidden text. apart from the few hidden links, everthing is strictly legal; i varied my anchor and contextual text religiously, was very careful to limit the BL growth speed, never used misleading ALT tags, stayed away from duplicate content, etc. etc. etc.

 

hmm... i see. but how would i know that i'm out of the sandbox? it's hard to rank well with a few pages, right?

 

Can't say I'm interested in what the news says. My stats say that things are still changing.
I just lost another 15 #1's this morning alone. This update is still playing out as far as I'm concerned.

 

ya reckon? hope you're right. i hit rock bottom on the 17th and have been stuck there ever since.

 

No kidding? I thought G likes big sites. Um, your sectors Shannon, are they competitive? Like, how many pages are returned in total? My main keyword returns about 2,600,000 results... Not too big but big enough for things to get ugly

 

Just curious what news was this, must have missed something myself? Article or post?

 

apparently, some blogger, a putative G employee, posted something implying that this was an update...

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=33748

of course, this goes against what most observers surmised. i don't think it makes any sense either. but hey, you can't fight the power...

 

Yes I did read that, I don't think you can jump to the point that it's a permanent one just yet though from that. At least those of us affected sure can hope so

 

Any 1 wanna hazard a guess at the length of the sandbox my sites been live 6 months and no move yet outa the box of sand \?? or has how are you supposed to tell and do google have a list of sandboxed and penalised sites?

thanks

 

5 pages you say? your SEO skills must be pretty darned good shannon.

i know that... but i am surprised that a search engine would know it. especially G.

 

well, technically i suppose they could always come out and say, "we tried this experiment of a beta spam filter feature and it wasn't quite ready yet so we are rolling it back"... but do big G have enough humility to do that? maybe they'll do it really quietly.

i suppose it's a good thing they are at least admitting that their results are stuffed with spam

you bet. but in addition to hoping i'm also getting myself a few more domains. good to have a plan B.

 

You rank on a page by page basis. The size of the site has little to do with where a single page ranks for a given term. Obviously it's way way harder to get a small site to rank well for multiple terms, but doing it for a primary term is no different than getting any other page to rank.

 

hey i was out of the sandbox but now i'm right back in. i can't tell the difference; some people say that when you enter your brand or site title as a search term, and your site comes up No. 1, you are not banned but penalized. but it looks exactly as if you're in the sandbox.

why sweat? you might just end up back in the box again anyway. actually, you might have come OUT of the sandbox on october 16 and got thrown back in on october 17.

sorry if i sound a bit cynical but i don't have much faith in G right now

 

I've witnessed sites being pulled in the past only to come back stronger than ever once the updates, fixes, or whatever you want to call it is totally complete. Main reason I say don't jump to it's permanent

 

Agreed, at the moment it looks like my established sites have dropped back into the sandbox. But from what I've seen overtime, this sort of thing isn't exactly an unusual event during an update. My sites are (mostly) still in the SERPs, so they're not banned. penalized, filtered, possilbly. Before doing anything I'll be giving it at least 14 days to see what pans out.
This certainly isn't the first time I've had sites disappear for a period of time, it is the first time I've seen it happen to multiple sites (of mine) at the same time.
At the moment, I'm can't see what people are using to justify the statement that it's permanent.

 

thanks mononsodium yeh g has a lot to answer for , im totally confused the site in question ranks really well in y and msn , and another 5 page site of mine ranks no where in any engine i ve found but has pr of 3 , i no pr is not deemed as anything big but it is a symbol that g acknowledges its there ahhhh