Hello writers,
I have some bad news, which may not actually be that bad. It is bad because it means that traffic has died in the short term, but isn’t so bad because the site will eventually come out of this really well. That news is that Excerptz.com has been ‘Sandboxed’ by Google.
The sandbox is an situation where Google throws all of your rankings, every single one of them, into complete oblivion but keeps your site in their Google index. Stuff that was ranking on the first page gets moved to the 30th, 40th or 50th page. Well, not necessarily those precise pages, but you get the drift.
The problem is really rather simple. I built Excerptz on a fresh domain registration on a short registration, and in hindsight that was a silly idea. Domains under 12 months old are most likely to be thrown into the playpen whilst Google tries to suss out precisely who you are and what you are. The wise move would have been to build on a 2, 3, 4 year domain on a long registration.
A lot of people doubt whether the sandbox actually exists, I myself was a skeptic until one of my sales pages got thrown in the pit a few months ago. The good news, and yes there can be good news despite the situation, is that my sales page came out of the sandpit within 8 weeks and is now ranking better than ever. If you are yourself a sandbox skeptic then you will probably refer to the scenario as the “Google Dance”, which is a similar concept and fresh domains are also the more likely when applying that theory.
So what does this mean exactly? It means that your articles won’t be winning any Google traffic until we reemerge. There are a few different reasons why a site can be sand boxed, the main ones are an unusual sitewide keyword density (e.g. suspicion of keyword spamming) and unusual back linking patterns. It is clear that a multi-topic site isn’t going to be suspected of the first, the highest keyword density on a whole site basis that we have is 1.4%.
What is likely to be the case however is that Google sees the backlinking patterns as unusual. A couple of writers built up substantial amounts of backlinks for their articles, up to 40 on each, but then stopped. I have no objection to the building of backlinks in this manner, which is why I should have purchased a domain with existing authority. These backlinks will also no doubt eventually benefit the site massively in terms of passing juice.
At one point this site was winning 2000 uniques per day with just 900 articles, that dropped off a fair bit recently, and this sandbox probably explains that situation. I use numerous SEO tools to analyze site progression, and the domain has built authority very quickly. Here is the SEO Moz result on site authority:
That is astounding progress for a site launched in December, 7 months ago. At the stage when we were seeing 3000+ page views on a typical weekday, in May, that domain authority said 26.
If I hadn’t had already experienced the sandbox / Google dance I would probably be having a nervous breakdown right now and getting a job as a glass collector in my local. Thankfully, I am instead able to look upon this as an inevitable occurrence and with a slight excitement at where stuff will rank when the site reemerges. As mentioned, a sales site of mine has not only regained SERPs but improved on them, in fact it has doubled its traffic since coming out.
So, what should you do? You write for money right? And whilst Google isn’t giving us traffic, you aren’t making any? I would suggest at this stage that you simply write articles which provide backlinks to your existing online content, these links will still be counted by Google as the site is still indexed. Forget about Excerptz as an income source for a while, but leave your content to see where it ranks when Google gets bored with building sand castles. If it returns and is ranked well above your primary content, then you can subsequently consider editing that content to make money rather than simply to pass juice.
You don’t have to publish anything of course, and that is understandable, but I would fully recommend that you leave your content until you know where Google wants to rank this domain after it has reached puberty.
You can read more about the Sandbox on my article Does The Google Sandbox Exist?.
I still think that we are onto a great thing with Excerptz, we have tonnes of unique content, a hell of a lot more deep backlinks than would be expected, an awesome design (even if I do say so myself), and no duplicate content. In addition, there are rumours that a PageRank update is coming in July. Hopefully that will be true, there have been no PageRank updates since January 2011 (a month after this site went launch), and I am confident that this site has already done enough for at least PageRank 2 if not higher.
Sit tight and enjoy the ride!
Cheers,
Ryan
ps. If you are still seeing impressions then they are probably from Yahoo or Bing, who don’t have a sandbox of their own.
Cheers Ryan .. I was beginning to despair … will probably do exactly as you suggest and leave my stuff where it is and focus on another site I’m working on .. fingers crossed eh :-)
Hi Ryan, its true that Google is the biggest player in internet search market, but we need to look to the sides to. Yahoo is well established on the market, Bing is reaching from behind and there is also the social media that can point to the excerptz.com content. Keep it up and to the best of traffic.
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Regards
Thanks for the update Ryan.
I will continue with posting bookmarks here as you suggest.
I only have one article posted here so far but I plan writing a lot more original articles so will continue to do so.
You are an experienced businessman and know what you are talking about. I have faith that this site is going to be ranked high and will earn us writers some good money once Google stops messing about.
Lorraine
Ryan, unfortunately I know exactly what you mean. My pointe shoes website suddenly stopped getting traffic from Google. It took me a while to realize what was happening, and then I spent some time looking at the site and fixing everything I could think of, which Google might not like.
I’m still not sure whether my changes did any good, or whether it would’ve come out of the sandbox eventually regardless!
Lol, well I’m glad that I experience it with a micro-site, because if I hadn’t I would be tearing my hair out right now. Once you have experienced it you can be confident when you say “keep your content where it is”, if I hadn’t have experienced it I would probably be saying “sorry guys we failed, move your content now” or something. With my last sandbox it was almost certainly keyword density that caused the problem, so I didn’t display tags, and changed the wording of the most keyword spammy articles, and that seemed to have done the trick. That is very unlikely to be the case this time, so it is almost certain to be backlinking patterns, probably the high quantity of low quality backlinks in a sudden burst. I can do two things, I can start automating low quality backlinks again or I can spend the time finding real high value backlinks. The former would probably see the site return quicker, but the latter would be a much more valuable solution for the long term, I prefer the natural way so I’ll go for the more sustainable clean solution! Cheers, Ry.
I have to admit I haven’t heard of this before so this is quite interesting. One point that you make about domain registration particularly caught my attention – so do you think it is best to register a domain for a couple of years at least instead of doing it year by year as I have been?
It is said that Google do look at length of registration yes, although I didn’t know this until my sales site went into the sandbox. A lot of people seem pretty convinced that 1 year registrations are treated with particular suspicion, and that a long registration shows the Google bot that you are here to stay rather an opportunist spam site. I now register my domains for 2 years.
I’ve now registered Excerptz.com until 2014 in the hope that traffic is much more stable once the site emerges from the sandbox, which I hope won’t be too long. It took me two months on the sales site, although I did nothing about it for 4 weeks, so in reality it took 4 weeks from making changes to seeing it come back. This time I think it will take a few very high quality backlinks, as well as for me to keep the content coming, so from tomorrow I will source 3-4 strong backlinks per day and write a couple of long unique articles each day until it reappears. Usually once you have been in the sandbox you don’t go back in it. You can still dance around a lot, but usually for a day or two at a time rather than a sustained period. I’m not worried about it, although I would be petrified if I hadn’t seen the sandbox for myself this year. I can confirm that Google traffic is now almost zero by the way, all traffic is coming from Yahoo, Bing, Facebook, Stumble Upon, makes you realise just how much impact that one business has when they play their games! Traffic is about 10% of its peak, and half of that is direct traffic, so Google drives over 90% of organic traffic this way and of course I hope that 90% comes back sooner rather than later! Cheers, Ry.
Ryan, as a website owner myself I to have been through this and in fact several times this year. One site I had has been gone for 10 weeks and recently danced its way back out last Thursday….
I’m sure you’ve probably heard this before but you could buy an old domain and do a 301 redirect – this would probably help as well.
On another note, many writers like myself will continue to write on Excerptz because of the nice looking format and backlink that we can get from our articles and not always simply because of the traffic.
Cheers
Hi hsb250, glad that you have experienced it too. And yes, just consider it a backlink place for now until things get back to normal :)
Excerptz must really be hitting rock bottom if my Blog is getting more views than my Excerptz articles! *grin* Being serious, I have every confidence that Excerptz will succeed – this is a blip and one that will be overcome.
Hmmm ‘We shall overcome’ suddenly pops into my head as I write this comment *LOL* think there was a Red-Dwarf episode with Rimmer singing it, or at least he was a ‘peace’ activist!
Anyways I divulge – the site is a good one and it’ll bounce back so most of use will still write here!
Yeah will be back, hopefully sooner rather than later. Looks like I won the attentions of a few hubbers today:
http://hubpages.com/forum/topic/78055
I did post to tell the user tilecleaninghub that trying to talk to him about SEO would be like trying to talk to homer simpson about the stock market.
It turns out that Hubpages don’t like me talking about Excerptz, so my posts got deleted, lol.
Did I say divulge? I meant diverge of course!
Thanks for the explanation, Ryan. I did wonder what was going on… I have faith in you to lead us out of the sandbox, though! I’ll stick around. And I’ll do more backlinks, too!
*Sandy
Cheers for the update Ryan, I am sure you and Excerptz will come through this so I will be sticking around.
I am familiar with the sandbox so it doesn’t bother me, so I too will continue to write at Excerptz. Every article or blog that I have had that went into the sandbox came back out better than when it went in.
Backlinks contribute to earnings and do their part in the long term scheme of things, so they can be valuable.
Good to see another person familiar with the sandbox, having a few of you around does help prevent me from looking like a lunatic.
I’m not worried – one of my sites just came out of an 8 week play in the sandbox and now its doing better than ever because I was still adding content in that time.
I am still adding content here that is not time sensitive – it’s sat unpublished at HP for long enough I thought I’d move it here were it cna be ignored by Google a bit longer, then it’ll be a nice surprise when Excerptz comes out the box and those articles start making me money again.
Wouldn’t it be fantastic if that could happen before October? For the bumper Xmas? Lol.
Aaah – sorry for the typos – didn’t realize there was no edit function on these comments.
Wow, maybe someone has mentioned this before, but it looks like Excerptz is now a PR 3 – so you can look forward to the many unsandboxed days to come.
Yep, got the PageRank 3 :-D
Hopefully this will mean some half decent rankings when the site settles down and returns to its previous authority. Really happy with that, means the backlinks are at least a little valuable too.
Yes, I saw also that excerptz is now PR3. This is great news. Hubpages sadly dropped to 5. Even Google dropped to 9.
It’s also perplexing to me that my writing client’s site dropped by one point — at a time when I was able to get a lot of backlinks from article submission sites with high PRs. Anyway, I’ve read somewhere that the PR changes occurred sometime in the third week of May, so … The server problems could also have affected the PR.
Novem, one possibility could be that the authority of your backlinks had fallen? Your high PR backlinks may have seen a fall in PR themselves? That could well be a logical solution? ThisIsFreelance.com, another new rev share site, also got PageRank 3 which I am happy about as Oli has done a lot of work with backlinking.
Well, let’s all just keep at it then – the great white hope is that google will learn to rank high not what has been backlinked by the millions, but what people like to read.
Just posted a rather lengthy article and have no second thoughts about adding more as I iron them out. I’m thinking this is going to be a banging site and making all of us some cash. Imagination is everything, think, be a do BIG! Katie :)
Dang, I meant, Think, be and do BIG!
Ryan,
Do gives a mail wen we’re out of sandbox.. I’d love to start publishing after that! ;)