Hey guys, Here's a scenario that I'm hoping someone can shed some light on for one of my sites: Site was put up 3 months ago with content and was hovering around page 9-10 in Google for about a month until it jumped up to page 4-5. This last week, it jumped to #6 on page 1 for about a day or so. Then it disappeared for a day and came back to spot #5 for another day. It's been 3 days and it's no where to be found for my main KW. The site still gets hits from other longtail KW's and has not been de-indexed. Could this be due to the site being sandboxed or something else? Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.
What have you been doing to piss Google off? Are those results affected by on-going optimization? You might have done something wrong. To me, the sandbox is a myth. There is an correlation between new website / index time but there is no such thing as a sandbox. Especially if you already showed up in SERPs at some point. PM me with your link and I'll have a look at your website.
I have been observing similar thing and it was due to the submission of page on the social bookmarking sites. After initial submission ( the page llinks are on higher page rank pages), the page has good effective backlinks. After sometimes it move to lower rank pages .....
Interestingly enough, I haven't submitted any of my sites to any social bookmarking sites. None of my other sites have experienced this phenomenon. Thanks for your input though!
To me this is the sandbox, I launched 7 sites around the same time and did different things to each site to see what happened. Most rated every well for the first few weeks and then the sites I had done more directory submissions etc on, got dropped completely, while the sites we did little work on did drop but not as much. Some sites are starting to come back up close to where we were in those first weeks but this is close to 9 or 10 months later. I had one site do similar to the above, where it went from page 2 to 4th position on page 1, stayed for a day and then went back to page 2, next day did the same and since then is sitting on page 2. I have seen this happen to other sites, and I believe it is part of the sandbox and an update. Your site is ready to move into this higher position and then it is pulled back due to the time it has been online. I saw a past clients site go through the same thing for a few months and now it sits at 2nd position on page 1 for target word ,this did only happen 12 months after it was online. Just be patient and give it some time and see what happens. Whether all this is just me over checking and reviewing things I am unsure, but it is what I have seen with some recent work.
Thanks milvos. I think you maybe right since this particular site is about 3 months old and my competitors have aged domains. I got excited that it jumped so quickly but it was very shortlived. I'll keep working on backlinks and content and when it comes out of the sandbox, it'll be in a better position.