Google Sandbox
December 4, 2009admin No Comments »Play Classical Guitar has been languishing in the Google sandbox for a while or at least that is what it feels like. It suddenly disappeared from the Google index just over a month ago, then just as suddenly (12 days later) re-appeared as high as 5 in the listing for Play Classical Guitar. This was only for about a week and again the site disappeared. I was at a loss as to why then found that there had been several crawl errors, I checked using Google’s Webmaster Tools. I reset my site map and the errors fell from 190+ to just 19, and I also added a custom Google search including Ad-sense to the site and within 2 hours Play Classical Guitar is ranked at 23.
I am aware that Caffeine (the new Google Search engine algorithm is being rolled out but surely that would not explain such a drop and re-appearance. Was the site in the sandbox? and if so why? The weird thing is I had a sale of 6 items the day after it disappeared!
Anyway I am non the wiser, however Google had been telling me that automated queries were originating from my computer or server and the only possible software I have that could be responsible is the Seoquake add on for Firefox, so be careful if you use that. Any ban imposed for this is temporary but I suppose if it persisted you could lose traffic for ever and Google accounted for around 78% of all my traffic.
The morale of the tale is read Google’s Terms and Conditions and ensure you stay well within them, once trapped it is almost impossible to find a logical answer for what went wrong. You certainly can not just call Google and ask! Be warned.
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