How to get out of Google Sandbox - part I

This time I'll tell you how do I managed to get my website out of Google's sandbox.

Story behind Google sandboxing:
I've got a regional website with around 300 quality articles visited by nearly 350 unique visitors per day. Suddenly visitors dropped downto 50-25/day. After checking my website's logs I found that Google has stopped from delivering me traffic. Months have passed before I discovered that during to 302 Redirects from other sites and other factors(using javascript header refresh=0 redirects) my website has been penaltised and went down from Google's index to Google's sandbox.

I changed a few things on the website and in 1 month my website was re-indexed and the traffic flow got back to normal. After 2 weeks of code rewriting here is what I did:

Emergency steps - do these first

1. Check whether are you using in your website meta-refresh javascript redirects. For example:

meta equiv="refresh" content="5; url=http://www.website.com/filename.php"

If so remove them, because they are assumed as spam by Google's Bot.

How: You can check your whole website by using software as: Xenu Link Sleuth. Download and start the program.

From there the whole process is straightforward - just type in the input box your website address and start the check. (click on File->Check URL. That brings up a form for you to fill in with your website's URL).
This tool will check every page on your website and produce a report. In the report if you see 302 redirects - beware and try to fix them. Using Xenu you could also check your website for broken links, etc.

2. Check if websites linking to you give HTTP response code 200 OK
2.1 at google search box type allinurl: http://www.yoursite.com

2.2 Check every website other than yours by typing them here and look for HTTP response code 200 OK.





2.3 If there are any that give 302 header response code then try to contact the administrator of the problematic website to fix the problem. If you think that they are stealing your Page Rank - report them to google report spam page with check mark on Deceptive Redirects.