This time I'll tell you how do I managed to get my website out of Google's sandbox.Here is also Part II of the escaping gooogle'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
http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.htmlDownload 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
http://www.webrankinfo.com/english/tools/server-header.phpand 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
http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.htmlwith check mark on Deceptive Redirects. by Nevyan Neykov
thanks, it's really useful
ReplyDeleteGreat tips, thanks man.
ReplyDeletethanks, my site now in sandbox
ReplyDeleteThanks it is very important to know the basics how to get out from the sandbox. Thanks for sharing it.
ReplyDeleteHi, your information is very useful, but it works for primary domain only. For secondary or sub-domain, how to do it (removing dynamic link)?
ReplyDeleteAlso, how to handle 503 & 504 errors?
Please email to me at gadget.alexlam@gmail.com
> we have followed your steps, however, those past dynamic links are still spidered by google often and therefore google thinks that we have duplicated content and penalized us in the sandbox for our competitve keywords.
ReplyDeleteAnswer: You'll have to redirect all the REQUESTS for your dynamic pages to the static ones using 301 redirect headers. This way the dynamic pages won't be seen anymore as a duplicate content.
Example 1(saving existing PageRank): Place those 2 lines in your .htaccess file:
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.php\?mode=look_item&item_id=([0-9]+)\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ /item-%1.html? [R=301,L]
This will redirect every request like: http://your_website.com/index.php?mode=look_item&item_id=5 to
http://your_website.com/item-5.html
Example 2(loosing existing page rank):
There is a second way: just disable dynamic pages crawling using robots.txt file using the following lines:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?