Blacklisted or Sandboxed?

[dalamar17]

I have recently launched a site in March and noticed the Googlebot visited twice (about 2 weeks apart) but has not been back since and I cannot find the domain in Google when I do a search. Has Google dropped my site or put it in the sandbox?

Jeff

[fulton savage]

If Googlebot visited, you're in the index somewhere, you're just new so Google doesn't trust you yet. I'd search for the domain name sans w's and .com's and start sifting the results.

My new site is was on page 8 for the domain name, now something like page 3.

Basically you can forget about getting ranked for the first 6-9 months unless you've got some big time links.

[scrubs]

You are in Google Sandbox, if you have a new domain that is. I have known domains to be in the sandbox for up to 6 months with my experience.

Have a look and see if G and crawled/indexed your website yet by entering site:www.yourdomain into a search

If you launched your site in March this is not a long time at all in the Search Engine World! :)

[dalamar17]

Ok, so if my domain name doesn't show up when I search Google site:domain.com and its a new domain that means its sandboxed then? I thought the sandbox would just put you in very low rankings but your site would still show up when you searched by its domain name. I also tried searching by domain without the .com and www and still nothing. I noticed that googlebot only looked at my index.html page and nothing else on both occaisions.

If it is sandboxed I guess I will just have to be patient then :(

[jimbeetle]

While you're being patient try to build some halfway good incoming links, they're a necessity for G to include the site in its index. And while you're at it, give a second look at your nav structure and how the links are coded. Make it as easy as possible for a spider to get around the site.

[scrubs]

As jimbeetle stated whilst you are waiting for a deep crawl/indexing of your site you need to concentrate on other points, i.e link building and website structure. It is not a simple case of sitting back and waiting, be pro-active and continue to develop your site.

It sounds like G has come in and found your homepage but not crawled the entire site. You will be in the G sandbox, prepare yourself for a wait until you appear in the SERPs.

[vayapues]

One comment here...

It is important, of course, to pay attention to search engine optimization. This will inevitably bring you good traffic. But also keep in mind, as has in part been pointed out by others, that there are other aspects to a well balanced website marketing plan.

Inbound links are good, because they help in in G, but they are also good because they deliver real customers to your website. The IBLs pointing to my sites deliver on average around 5 users per day per link. Some are much higher, delivering hundreds of users, and some are much lower delivering virtually no users, but you can see how the math works out to give me traffic. In fact, when seeking links, this is my primary goal. I ask myself, will this link deliver targeted traffic to my site? The boost in the search engine is only a secondary, and side benefit.

It has also been mentioned in-part by others in this thread the importance of a solid structured and well organized website. Again, good SEO should be considered, but my main goal is to create a site that is easy to navigate by the end-user, and that looks nice. Remember, your customers will make up their mind about your website within 1/20th of a second, so it is important the site look nice. This will dramatically effect your conversion rate, and can increase sales many times over. Like links, there is a search engine side-effect. If your site looks good, others begin linking to you naturally, without your requesting it. This delivers more customers, and boosts your PR in G. The solid site structure helps spiders find their way through the site.

While you wait to take off in organic listings, as has been wisely pointed out by others, you can do a lot of things today, that will deliver traffic today (main goal) but that will have the side-effect of boosting your organic listing in the SERPs dramatically, and that will address your original question, of how you can speed up the process of being included in Google. The things I, and others have mentioned will get you listed in Google and other SEs much quicker, and will also increase the depth to which Google spiders will go within your site.

In my opinion a healthy website relies very little on the search engines for traffic. You want to, of course, pay attention to them, by being smart, and harnessing the side-effects of what you do for your customers. But remember that if your business model is dependent on search engine results, you will eventually find yourself on the bottom. On the other hand, if you depend on other forms of marketing to drive customers to your site, the side effect is that you generally do very well in the search engines, but even if you don't, it is no skin off your back. In my opinion, a healthy site should get no more than 10% of their traffic from search engines.

[dalamar17]

Vayapues,

You make an excellent point and I have never really thought of it that way! Thanks for the fresh perspective and to everyone else for all their input and comments. This forum is an excellent resource.

Jeff