Trying to pin point why I'm in the sandbox - maybe you can help

So, I guess that I'm in the sandbox now - and I've been twiddling my thumbs and building links and so forth. Its been about a month since this has happened. I've come to terms with it but for some closure, maybe you can answer these questions for me - thanks.

1. Is the sandbox an automated procedure set up by a series of algorithms, or does someone manually say "ha, you're in the sandbox now buddy!" and pushes a button?

2. To my knowledge I have not done anything black hat, I did however use a directory submission service, which I will never do again, because I paid for 1000 submissions and they were only able to do 600. I'm kind of new to this, so it never dawned on me that they were submitting my site to all sorts of directories. I guess having your site submitted to non relevant directories is bad, huh?

3. Can too many reciprocal links hurt you? from now on should I only try to get one way links to my site?

4. I use a lot of methods for traffic, squidoo, EZA, forums, blogs, hubs, etc. Is it a bad idea to link from these sources straight to my main site? would it be better if I linked these things to a particular squidoo lens, article, or blog, and have one of those sources be the main way to find my site?

In some ways I know that I'm probably answering my own questions, but I just need absolute clarification so that I can prioritize better. Thanks guys - you rock!

 

Yuppers. No one's out to get your site if you're sure that's where you are

Someone else can handle the other Qs

 

Okay - first question is - How do YOU know that your site is in the sandbox?

 

Well everyone seems to have a different opinion on the sandbox. I suppose that it could refer to both a site being banned or dropped in google. My site is not banned, but it has dropped massively.

I clicked through about 100 pages of search listings and couldn't find it. I've heard some people mention that this is just a natural process that happens to baby sites, but I don't believe that is set in stone. My first site never had this problem at all, so this was like the last thing that I wanted to deal with.

I'm just trying to backtrack to see if google put me through its paces, or if I did something to bring this on - I wanna learn from this experience, might as well anyways.

 

Thanks, that's one big question down

 

2. It's not bad to submit to directories, but they aren't going to do much for rankings. They might help for traffic if they are relevant.

3. The only links you should be getting are one way backlinks. Reciprocal links are garbage.

4. It's not a bad idea to link directly from those pages. It's better to link them directly to your site in my opinion because you are getting more votes from different domains.

 

Thanks - this was very helpful. So do links from viral video, squidoo, articles, blogs, forums, etc have as much weight? Does PR still make a big difference with these services?

Should I try and get some links going to my articles and lenses?

 

You can if you want, but it's just going to raise the trust and rank of the articles/lenses page. The article/lenses page is only giving you one vote to your main domain. I don't bother with lenses and stuff like that. I just get straight links from .edu's and old trusted domains. Also watch for nofollow links. A lot of blogs and stuff like that are nofollow now, so you could be wasting your time building links to an article page that is passing no link juice to your main page. Install the nodofollow plugin on firefox if you don't have it.

 

Sweet, never heard of it but I will do just that. Thank you very much.

Yeah, lenses are a joke I think, but I do it when I have extra time. Haven't tried any link lovin' from .edu sites yet, trying to find the right ones that are related.

I started uploading pdf content to scribd.com, thinking that they would maintain my links - they don't, but I wonder if there's a trick to it that I don't know about. I don't even think a word document would keep the link in place with their encoding, but I heard through the grape vine that it can be done, and that its highly beneficial. Still yet, scribd.com does offer a lot of immediate exposure, a LOT.

 

If I knew what site you were tallking about I would have a look at it for you!

 

You'll find it under my profile name - thanks.

 

Could be a duplicate content issue as your homepage is copied on another two sites. One example is http://www.easydigitalsales.com/12055/Guitar-Speed-Secret.html

 

Oh it never ends - I hardly have the time to enforce the TOS of my own site. People can be so lazy - so I know that duplicating everything on another site is really bad, but wouldn't this just hurt their site - I mean I didn't do it, and my design, content, structure was their first - can't google see this in their logs?

 

Google will probably shaft the lower ranking site!

 

One month is very short time to talk about rankings and sandbox. Just keep building content and links at uniform pace and you will see results in 2-3 months. And that is the time you will get an idea if your site is really sandboxed or not.

 

Thanks, yeah I was kind of thinking that too - we'll see how she does in a few months then. Thanks guys for all your advice - by the way - I always trust advice from a person who has Catherine Bell as their avatar - at least I THINK that's Catherine Bell - looks like her.

 

How did this affect your traffic?

 

In this case the duplicate content may hurt your rankings, but that may or may not be a bad thing.

However, since your site is exactly mirrored, your SALES should go up since they are doing your advertising for you. I would think the duplicate content in this case might be good for you since it will increase your sales even though your PR and traffic on your site may be down. And to me net profit is MORE IMPORTANT than any ego boosting ranking.

 

I would like to disagree with you on your first point. I have one site that is under three months old that, for back links, has only directories and is a PR3.

The content isn't spectacular and there are only 12 pages and the only SEO I have done with it is directory back links.

 

Since this site is so new, it never got fantastic traffic. So when google dropped it off the first page, there wasn't much affect. Still, yet - having it up their when I do start getting better traffic would be like the cherry on top.