Long-time site sandboxed after a CSS redesign

[marshman]

This is my first post here. I've been reading quite a bit on the forums and have tried out the various tools discussed here (like the Sandbox Detection tool (http://www.socengine.com/seo/tools/sandbox-tool.php)).

A site that I run seems to have become sandboxed. It's been around since 1998, has a PR8 on the home page, has a lot of backlinks (plenty to the home page and a lot to various other entry points), and millions of pages of quality content. We've never tried any SEO optimizations - we've just built a useful site and it's built up traffic over the years.

In November of 2004, we rolled out a new design for the site. Same exact link structure, same exact text content everywhere - we just changed it to a 100% CSS layout with a nice fresh look. Since then, we've seen the search result position plummet on all of the searches that bring people to the site. The clearest example is searching on the sentence on our home page (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&c2coff=1&q=%22An+easy-to-use+archiving+service+for+electronic+mailing+lists %22&btnG=Search).

On Yahoo, MSN, and Teoma this sentence brings up our home page as the #1 result. This was the case on Google a few months ago, too. Now you have to wade through page after page of useless link directories before you finally get to our home page as the very last result. (Not that this is a realistic search string for a user, but it demonstrates what has happened.) These link sites seem really useless from a Google user's point of view.

Two other things I noticed while writing this up - I used the Google Dance Tool (http://www.uncoverthenet.com/google-dance/dancing.php) to compare results at different data centers. 1) Our development server (called unagi) was exposed for a while and Google crawled it. Perhaps they are penalizing us because it looked like we were duplicating content at a different URL. It was just an oversight on our part and that development server is offline now. 2) Some datacenters have our BL count at 103,000 while most of them have our BL count at 1340. What a strange, huge difference.

I'm sorry if this post is a bit long. I'd love to hear any suggestions on what we should try doing. It feels strange to consider applying SEO techniques to get us out of the Google Sandbox since we never used any SEO techniques to get us in this penalty box. Is our CSS redesign to blame? Is it time for us to consider the services of an SEO expert? Or are there common sense things we could try? A lot of the anti-sandbox techniques don't seem to apply to us so well since we aren't trying to rank high on a particular set of keywords...the searches that bring people to the content are all over the board.

Thanks! Sorry if I used any of the terms incorrectly...I'm still learning about sandbox/PR/SERP/BL/etc.

Jeff

[dannysullivan]

I agree, it's odd your page isn't coming up for that string of words. I do find you eventually, but way back (http://www.google.com/search?q=%22An+easy-to-use+archiving+service+for+electronic+mailing+lists %22&hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&safe=off&start=60&sa=N) at number 62 or so.

But here's the big thing that stands out. Go back at Google, or even more noticeable at the others. See all the other sites coming up. Visit some of them, and you'll see they've simply taken the search results from various search engines where you've been included and put them on their own pages.

Why? Look at the top, and you'll see many of these pages have Google AdSense ads. They're using the search results as fodder to get traffic -- which in turn earns them money off of AdSense.

I'm wondering if your site is being impacted somehow by all this type of duplication. Just having all those other pages out there with that phrase naturally increases the competition.

Love to hear what others thing. the terms "mail" and "archive" are pretty common, but I'd still expect a site like yours to hit the top results for a search on mail archive and even more so for "mail archive." Head-scratcher that it is not.

[ThouShaltSeo]

Danny,
they're plenty of webmasters reporting the same: website is poorly ranked even for www.domain.com. All the spammy links rank way before them. Even unique domains with hundreds of backlinks are beeing affected. The fact that you changed CSS it's just a coincidence IMO.

I agree, it's odd your page isn't coming up for that string of words. I do find you eventually, but way back (http://www.google.com/search?q=%22An+easy-to-use+archiving+service+for+electronic+mailing+lists %22&hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&safe=off&start=60&sa=N) at number 62 or so.

But here's the big thing that stands out. Go back at Google, or even more noticeable at the others. See all the other sites coming up. Visit some of them, and you'll see they've simply taken the search results from various search engines where you've been included and put them on their own pages.

Why? Look at the top, and you'll see many of these pages have Google AdSense ads. They're using the search results as fodder to get traffic -- which in turn earns them money off of AdSense.

I'm wondering if your site is being impacted somehow by all this type of duplication. Just having all those other pages out there with that phrase naturally increases the competition.

Love to hear what others thing. the terms "mail" and "archive" are pretty common, but I'd still expect a site like yours to hit the top results for a search on mail archive and even more so for "mail archive." Head-scratcher that it is not.

[sem4u]

I could be wrong but maybe more weight is being put on some internal anchor text. These kind of results sites linking in have tightly focused anchors in an attempt to get these pages as high up the SERPs as possible. Revenue can then be collected via AdSense or PPC clicks.

Your site should be coming up #1 for that phrase and high up for the company/website name. I expect that your company name is in the anchors of many links, such as directory listings.

I think we will see changes over the coming days as Google engineers get a chance to look at patterns in the data. I would hope that situations like this will be 'corrected' so that sites can at least rank for their own name (unless it is a really common keyword/phrase). The update is still in progress as I see two sets of results across the datacenters. Let's hope that they pick the right one ;)

[marshman]

Yeah, we used to appear in the top few results when searching on "mail" and "archive" together up until late last year on Google. We're going to hope that this is just a transitional state of affairs for Google and that they'll fix things up to be more reasonable for the sake of it's users. If things don't seem to improve in the next month I'm sure I'll be seeking more help.

[Yayagogo]

This is also my first post here, and it is mainly because marshman's situation and ours is virtually identical. I post my findings below in the hopes it will help find a solution to this mess.

- Our site is 5 years old PR6 and has a unique brand name. We have thousands of incoming links containing our brand name. Same as marshman.

-When searching for 'Decidio' (brand name), we appear #145, marshman appears same for his brand name. We have always been #1 (up until Feb 3), and continue to be #1 at yahoo and msn. The #1 currently ranked for this search is especially vexing, as the word is nowhere to be found on that page. Sites linking to us, spammy sites also ranking above us for our brand.

- Our development server now also is getting crawled for some reason (same as marshman). This dev server does not have any links pointing to it, and I am at a loss at how it was discovered. Duplicate penalty possible, so I just told our technical staff to ban all spiders in robots.txt.

- Other sites appear above us for our :<a href='http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Seeking+a+local+vendor+for+your+weddin g%2C+birthday+party%2C+anniversary%2C+corporate+pa rty%2C+or+other+private+event%3F%22&hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1'>homepage text</a>. We dont even rank for our own homepage text!

-We did not change any CSS, so I dont think this is the solution to this situation IMO.

-Hope this helps. I am also available for any questions.

[Michael Martinez]

Marshman,

If you are trying to rank for "mailing list archive" or anything similar to that, you changed far more than your style sheets. You completely removed all terms related to that phrasing from your front page. The most recent copy of your site which is indexed by archive.org shows a date of February 2004. You have "mailing" and "archives" embedded in your visible, indexable text.

I have been reading a lot of these February 2005 Google-killed-my-site discussions here and elsewhere and I suppose I am not any more surprised by all the wild theories people concoct about what is going on at Google than I have been in the past.

All the hysteria usually revolves around the evils of bleeding PageRank (which has been meaningless for years, as far as getting good SERP results goes), the evils of inbound links (which most people are overdoing), the evils of this-that-and-the-other.

Most often, when something goes wrong with a Google listing, it is because we have done something to shoot ourselves down. Less than two weeks ago I created a new content page on my primary domain. I've gotten used to seeing the new pages go live in Google's primary cache within a week (sometimes in just 2-3 days, but they seem to be rolling out weekly indexes on Sunday or Monday, and have been since mid-December).

Well, this particular page didn't show up. After a week, I decided to look at the code to see what I did wrong. I had included a background image, something I don't normally do. To make my main body text readable against that image, I set the font color to white but forgot to set the background color to black. So, I had a great deal of white-on-white text.

Well, we all know how stupid that kind of mistake is. I fixed it and within three days the page showed up in the primary cache and is ranking in the top ten for two primary search phrases and in the top twenty for a secondary phrase.

I believe that your site will regain its position if you put "mail" and "archive" back on the front page (maybe repeat them). It would not hurt to use H1 header tags. I know a lot of people now believe they hurt. I'll agree that you can get good rankings without using header tags.

But I still get consistently good results by using them. So far, every page I have targeted for the top ten has made it without a hitch (except for the accidental white-on-white page) within a week since mid-December. They all use a combination of H1,H2,H3 headers. So, at the very least, Google is NOT penalizing for use of those headers.

While your problem may not be universal to the other sites lodging similar complaints, I believe the fix will be easy to make and you should (because you do have so much indexed content) see the result (if any) of applying my suggestion within a week.

Given how much time you've been in the sandbox, I would say one week is worth the effort.

I'll be curious to know whether that fixes your problem. If it doesn't, then I still need to do some more research on the Google situation.

But, right now, all the evidence I have examined (including what I've been able to derive from these various forums) points toward Google tightening its algorithm around in-page content.

[excell]

I believe this has little to do with the "sandbox". Google appears to be handling phrase searches (with quotes on) in a very strange way currently.

The original poster may find that the website comes up under normal search & that other things with algo changes are affecting the results.

There is a phrase that I have on my homepage that I check on every now and then to see who has stolen my copy etc.

Right now my website does not even come up at all for the term! Just the scrappers that are using it. I started to condense the term in quotes down and the results are plain ridiculous.

Down to a competitive 3 word phrase -
quotes on - nowhere ! - no listing!
quotes off - top ten ranking.

Our website is most definately not sandboxed (top 10 rankings for 6 years)...conclusion - Google has lost the plot! or is trying to do something that is not working well from a searcher point of view. :eek:

Adding - I do agree with Michael M & strongly suggest you follow through and add more content to your page/s if you have lost text on the page when making changes.

[caveman]

Actually, I think it has everything to do with the sandbox. There are now many, many reported (and in our case obvserved) instances of sites vanishing after redesigns, especially when the redesigns included transformations to css, or within the site's nav structure. We're all but certain that this causes sites that were previously healthy to be viewed as over SEO'd and sandboxed.

Allegra let the borderline cases out. But beware about site wide changes that involve css for the first time, or substantial changes to nav. FWIW.

[Cyberskull]

I don't think it was due to the re-design of the site especially if it happend in Feb. The reason I say this is becuase the same exact thing happend to me in Feb with one of my sites and I had not changed "ANYTHING" on the site.

My site has been up since 2003 and has a PR of 6. The site was ranking well for most of the keyterms I was going for most of the time top 10. My actual domain name was ranked #1, the domain name is buygifts.ca.

Domain Search (http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&c2coff=1&rls=GGLD%2CGGLD%3A2005-08%2CGGLD%3Aen&q=buygifts.ca)

Ever since the Feb Update my domain name is all the way down. To a certain extent this it seems like it is some sort of Sandbox. Since then I re-designed my website, implemented a mod-rewrite with 301's thinking it would help some but unfortunately it has not helped at all.

At this point I can not do anything other then wait and see what happens.

[Michael Martinez]

I don't think it was due to the re-design of the site especially if it happend in Feb. The reason I say this is becuase the same exact thing happend to me in Feb with one of my sites and I had not changed "ANYTHING" on the site.

My site has been up since 2003 and has a PR of 6. The site was ranking well for most of the keyterms I was going for most of the time top 10. My actual domain name was ranked #1, the domain name is buygifts.ca.

Put "Buy Gifts" on your page, in human-readable, indexable content (preferably in an H1 header tag).

[Cyberskull]

Michael,

I have added the following to the home page:
<h1>Buy Gifts</h1>
<p><strong>Buy Gifts</strong> for everyone on your list,
buygifts.ca provides awesome products at amazing prices.&nbsp;
Buy Gifts today and make someone happy tommorow.

I don't think it will make any difference at all since before Feb I was getting on a daily basis about 400 referalls from Google where now I get 0. :)

[Cyberskull]

Here is another good example of a NON competative keyword.

I made this page just for testing a while back and from day one when the page was cached I was #1 as I'm the only one who has the same combination of the letters on the page.

Here is the Google Search (http://www.google.com/search?q=ko+je+supak&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official)

You won't find my page anywhere on the result.

And here is the page on my website: Ko Je Supak (http://www.buygifts.ca/ko-je-supak.html)

As you can see the keyword there is Ko Je Supak.

[Michael Martinez]

Michael,

I have added the following to the home page:


I don't think it will make any difference at all since before Feb I was getting on a daily basis about 400 referalls from Google where now I get 0. :)

Google will always index human-readable content. Determining relevance is complicated.

Since we don't know what Google changed, it may take another four to six months before people start to recover lost rankings.

I can only tell you that I am still getting new content in and doing well. I am following my tried-and-true practices of relying upon content optimization and internal linking.

When you have a lot of content, it's best (in my opinion) to make it work for you.

Just keep in mind that Amazon is doing pretty well in the search results right now, which is usually an indication that something big is broke at Google.

[Michael Martinez]

Here is another good example of a NON competative keyword.

I made this page just for testing a while back and from day one when the page was cached I was #1 as I'm the only one who has the same combination of the letters on the page.

Not any more, you aren't.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&c2coff=1&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=%2B%22ko+je+supak%22

[Cyberskull]

Not any more, you aren't.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&c2coff=1&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=%2B%22ko+je+supak%22


I ment to say that I'm the only one that actually has the page optimized to rank for that keyword.

I have the keyword in:

<Title>
<h1>
<strong>

It's just weird to see how some of the sites like mine were dropped for no reason what so ever :( hehe

[Michael Martinez]

It's just weird to see how some of the sites like mine were dropped for no reason what so ever :( hehe

No APPARENT reason, you mean.

But you're assuming your sites DROPPED. You're not taking into consideration the possibility that other sites simply ROSE.

It all depends on what Google did, why they did it, and whether they are going to stay with the change.

If things haven't reversed by the end of March, I would say the change is probably permanent.

[Cyberskull]

No APPARENT reason, you mean.

But you're assuming your sites DROPPED. You're not taking into consideration the possibility that other sites simply ROSE.

It all depends on what Google did, why they did it, and whether they are going to stay with the change.

If things haven't reversed by the end of March, I would say the change is probably permanent.


I have to disagree with regards to other sites taking me over for "Every Single Keyword" I was targeting. I would agree with you if a few or even a bunch of my keywords were outranked but not the entire site and even its domain name.

I can't even see Google making some sort of "Site Wide" changes to their algorithm because if that was the case them almost all of us would have been affected in Feb just like the Florida update. All of this leads me to believe that this is some sort of site specific hit, I can't tell you why me nor can I tell you why the rest of the guys I've just simply never seen anything like this before.
To go from 400 referrals per day to 0 really hearts :)

[Michael Martinez]

I have to disagree with regards to other sites taking me over for "Every Single Keyword" I was targeting. I would agree with you if a few or even a bunch of my keywords were outranked but not the entire site and even its domain name.

It depends on what Google did.

I can't even see Google making some sort of "Site Wide" changes to their algorithm because if that was the case them almost all of us would have been affected in Feb just like the Florida update.

It doesn't have to affect the same people as were affected then. Each major change in their algorithm introduces its own set of variables.

There are way too many people complaining of "site specific hits" for these changes in listings to really be "site specific hits" -- not unless Google has a huge list of enemies they just absolutely cannot tolerate being in their search results any more.

You are one of many, not the only the only one, to have felt the effects of this change.

[etehigraphy]

Hi. I was looking for information about my sudden drop in rankings when I came across this thread. It looks as though this is a fairly common problem. I suppose if no one really knows the solution to this problem, the only thing to do at the moment is to compile some data - so the site is 12vautotech.com (http://www.12vautotech.com)
and the search string is - 12 volt auto accessories.

In my particular instance my site fails to rank in the top 100 for only one phrase - sadly the most commonly searched phrase for my market segment. Rankings for other search strings do not appear to have been affected at all. The site is almost 2 years old, so this is not due to the new site sandbox effect.

[Cyberskull]

Hi. I was looking for information about my sudden drop in rankings when I came across this thread. It looks as though this is a fairly common problem. I suppose if no one really knows the solution to this problem, the only thing to do at the moment is to compile some data - so the site is 12vautotech.com (http://www.12vautotech.com)
and the search string is - 12 volt auto accessories.

In my particular instance my site fails to rank in the top 100 for only one phrase - sadly the most commonly searched phrase for my market segment. Rankings for other search strings do not appear to have been affected at all. The site is almost 2 years old, so this is not due to the new site sandbox effect.

That's interesting..... What i would like to know is did this drop happen in Feb and if so can you provide us with an exact date if possible. (check your logs).

If that is not the case then your page dropped becuase you have been out ranked or possibly lost some bl's or something other then this Feb Update.

[etehigraphy]

I feel a little silly, but looking at my logs it does not appear that I would have ever appeared in the top results for that phrase on google. It seems odd to me that the site would rank well in other search engines, but not google - especially when the google results (especially after page 1) have nothing to do with the phrase. I checked the SEOmoz sandbox detection tool, too. I got a 68.