I have a website that was around since 2003. It was well indexed on Google and in September I had to move the site to a new host. After the move the Google search engine traffic is nearly zero. I sent a sitemap and checked Google's Webmaster tools and it says it cached the pages, but they aren't showing up in the index. Is this the "sandbox effect" I keep hearing about?
Hello, Did the URL structure of your website changed when you moved it to the new hosting company? How long was the website down during the move? If the URL structure didn't change, and if your website didn't experience an extended downtime (let's say more than a day, depending on how often was your website cached by Google), then that's not the reason for the effects that you are noticing. Usually sandbox activates for getting too many links to your website at once, then stop/decrease the incoming links. Try checking site:www.yourdomain.com in google search and let us know if the pages of your website show up there. If they show up there, then your website is simply not ranking, but it is indexed and this has nothing to do with website moving, but rather with linking and/or duplicate content on your website. I hope this helps.
Hi Mike, Thanks for all the advice. This has been really enlightening. - The URL structure did not change. - We did experience extended downtime where the site would partially operate due to loading issues for 48 hours. - Also there was an error where the IP address of the new server was put in wrong. So I suppose the site had to bounce from an incorrectly pointing IP to the correct IP. I used the Google site check trick to search and I found some interesting results! The static html written pages for my site are there and fine. However, all of the posts like 8,000 or so on Wordpress aren't in the database. This goes for old and new pages. During the extended downtime the loading issues killed the Wordpress portion of the site, which is the core of the site. I logged on to Google Webmasters and checked the back links too and found there were 48,000 something links to the site. But these were achieved over time and not all at once. The other strange thing is the only backlinks google has registered are for the static HTML pages. The Wordpress pages aren't anywhere in the linked area even though some of the content was recently linked to top tier sites like a TV network. I'm confused why the Wordpress pages aren't showing up in Google or any other search engine for that matter