After three months of hard-work, dealing with duplicate content issues (here in China competitors who cannot come up with proper English content do not hesitate to copy-paste your site and put it on an older generic domain, pushing your own pages to the supplemental!), yesterday I was surprised when checking through webceo to see my client satellite TV site jump to the top 10 or 20 for almost all the major targeted keywords! It was about time, I have achieved high rankings in Yahoo and MSN after taking over the project within two weeks, but the site has been absent from the top 100 of Google SERPs. Keeping my finger crossed that they will not disappear tonight! Good to be out of Google Sandbox!
Google's algorithm should have been able to handle duplicate content like that, punish the copy-cats and not you, but obviously it did not. It's only another example that Google's algorithm is overpraised.
Yes, but it happens to me not only once or twice...The first time I found it I was doing a random search for one of the keywords then I found one site description to be identical to my client's but the url was different. I click on the link, to find a site almost 100% identical to mine, only the contact information removed...In some cases, the copiers could not handle or modify the contact form (or they are just too lazy) so any enquiry through that site arrives in the clients mail! Unbelievable...
The flaw I guess would be in the trustrank. If the older domain had been playing ball, then naturally it would have priority over a sandboxed domain. Very very interesting observation... LOL
what do you think made you come out of the sandbox ? i am sure that you wont know for certain , but what are the things you did as an attempt ?
you hit the nail on the head...I know for a fact I got sandboxed for one keyword in particular...is there a way to get my site ranking for that word again? Build anchor text with other links so it is more evenly spread? I don't rank for this term because 98% of my links had the exact anchor text...this is annoying
Hey Dzuster, If you search for your site on google lets say you enter search term as http: //yoursite.com and if at the results page there is a message which says something like this then your site has been sandboxed by google. If this message doesnt come at the end of the result page then congrates you have not been sandboxed by google... "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 2 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."