Don’t get put in the Google sandbox

How to avoid the Google sandbox

436862 sandbox Dont get put in the Google sandbox

I recently posted a long thread on the warriorforum about how I had ranked for some very competitive keywords and of how I had done this in just a week. I’m a really honest person so I have to tell you I made a very big mistake which costs me those ranks just a few days later.

I am sure you have heard of the Google sandbox before. Basically if your website gets “sandboxed” it means that it has been deindexed by Google. If your website gets deindexed, then even typing in the full url in Google search won’t get you any results. How devastating! Well I want to tell you first of all that if your website get’s sandboxed it is okay. It’s horrible when it happens to you but it’s not the end of the world. More importantly is the lessons you learn by having it happen.

So what will cause your website to be put in the Google Sandbox?

If every time you got caught speeding you got a $10,000 fine I bet you would stop speeding pretty quickly. This is exactly what happens if your website get’s sandboxed. Look at it as if you were speeding and Google gave you a $10,000 fine fro excessive speeding. If you know anything about internet marketing I expect that you know that content is king and backlinks are the king’s soldiers. You write a great article and you recruit backlinks into your ranks to tell Google how great your kingdom is and to defend against the other competing kingdom. Perhaps this is a silly analogy but this is exactly how SEO or search engine optimization works.

When you create backlinks excessively and at too fast a rate it sends a red flag to Google and they watch your site more closely. Just like the police do when you start speeding on the highway. When you suddenly make an abrupt stop this tells Google something is seriously wrong and they penalize you for it. When backlinks are being created if they are not being built up at a consistent rate Google see’s this as unnatural and your hard earned rankings will truly suffer. They will de-index your website which is more commonly known as your website being put in the Google Sandbox.

How long will your website be stuck in the Google Sandbox?

That completely depends. Now you may be asking yourself but I just found your website and it was in the top ranks for Google, your website isn’t sandboxed. No it isn’t but it has been twice since I created it. This second time it happened is more important however so I will mainly focus on that. Just a week and a half ago I was sitting pretty with all of my targeted keywords sitting in the top ten positions on Google. These are very competitive keywords and it took a lot of hard work to rank for them. One week, to be exact it actually probably took about 80 hours. Wow that’s quick you must be an expert at SEO? Thank you, I’m pretty good. However every once in a while when I start to see results I get greedy and that killed me for a week and a half.

I had a friend who had over 6,000 posts on a few forums he used to be an active member of and I asked him to just put my link into his signature. At this same time instead of building naturally I started speeding excessively and driving recklessly picking up backlinks from anywhere I could. I even went nuts pinging about 300 of my friend’s forum links. Thinking Google won’t find all 6,000 overnight. Well as I’m sure you guessed Google did in fact find them right away and my precious website was once again thrown into the Google Sandbox virtually overnight.

I got out of the Google Sandbox and you can too!

Fast forward one week and I am back to ranking in the top 20 for most of my keywords. Lesson learned don’t try to outsmart Google. I bet you are saying of yeah you got your rankings back because of those 6,000+ backlinks though. Well if that’s what you are thinking you are completely wrong. While I really wanted my friend to keep the links up when he heard of my travesty he blamed himself and took my links down. This was unfortunate as it hurt me even more making it look like I had spammed those forums with my links and they had removed them.

The truth is that once you figure out the SEO secrets no matter what you do if you follow them you will eventually rank for any keyword phrases you want. I’m gonna be completely honest with you understanding how SEO works is easy. The hard part is putting it into practice and seeing results. I have in the last two weeks had my website fall to the 300+ positions for my keywords twice and twice I have gotten myself back to the top. So why did I create this article? I created it so that anyone who reads it will not make the same mistakes I did and watch their hard earned rankings plummet to the bottom again. It’s a very frustrating thing to have happen and while I think it will teach you a lesson, all you have to do is read a few articles online to understand how devastating being put in the Google Sandbox is for your online business.

Google Sandbox because of duplicate content

One more important thing I need to address here besides that you need to build your website naturally and at a consistent pace is that you need to make sure that your website either redirect all its pages to www or to http. If you have a www and a http address for your website Google sees this as two different websites with the same exact content. Duplicate content is one of the biggest reasons that people fail online. Google absolutely hates it. So make sure that when you type in www it redirects to http: or vice versa. If you do not then not only will Google penalize your site and you will be in more danger of being put into the Google sandbox, but it will split your backlink authority as well as your overall pagerank thus causing you to rank very low in search engines.

So follow my tips and you will be able to avoid making the mistakes I have made with websites in the past and with this one in particular. The Google sandbox is no joke but again it isn’t the end of the world and building backlinks at a consistent rate after a google sandbox could have you ranking again in just a week. Hey I did it! I also have to re-emphasize how important it is to have your website url resolved. Again if it is not then Google will see everything you have on your website as duplicate content and we all know how much they love copy cats. There a good chance if Google feels that your website is just duplicate content, that they will put you in the Google Sandbox.