Google Sandbox - Does it exist?

onlinework

onlinework

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I have 2 years old website which is performing pretty well on Bing but not on Google. I got like 2-3 clicks a day from Google so I believe it got hit by some kind of Sandbox for a longer period of time. All pages are indexed and all that stuff is good. Checked the domain history and everything looks clean. I still cannot figure it out. I taught to make a 301 redirect to a new domain but I am not sure if that will affect the Bing traffic as well. Anyone that has similar problems in the past please give a solution. The website is already monetized so I don't want to put it on risk and lose the Bing traffic as well. P.S This happened to only one of the websites I own.
 
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Sandbox should not be so long.

Check your index status with site:domain.com - how many pages are indexed.
Check is your domain ranking on brand (domain without .com).
Also, check on Ahrefs (free Webmaster Tools) - is your homepage ranking at all on some keywords.

Do not even pay attention what shows about ranking keywords GSC - it shows even on algo penalty.
 
Smeklinis said:
Sandbox should not be so long.

Check your index status with site:domain.com - how many pages are indexed.
Check is your domain ranking on brand (domain without .com).
Also, check on Ahrefs (free Webmaster Tools) - is your homepage ranking at all on some keywords.

Do not even pay attention what shows about ranking keywords GSC - it shows even on algo penalty.
Click to expand...
site:domain.com - 100+ pages indexed

ranking - homepage -when I search for brand name it shows my social media pages not the domain. When I search with com it shows the website.

ahrefs: I manually checked and the website is ranking on page 9 for particular kws but these are very low kws and I have like hundreds like this. Something is obviously wrong.

I am ready to pay for a solution for this problem without revealing the website if possible.
 
onlinework said:
site:domain.com - 100+ pages indexed

ranking - homepage -when I search for brand name it shows my social media pages not the domain. When I search with com it shows the website.

ahrefs: I manually checked and the website is ranking on page 9 for particular kws but these are very low kws and I have like hundreds like this. Something is obviously wrong.

I am ready to pay for a solution for this problem without revealing the website if possible.
Click to expand...
If your site is older than a few months it’s not sandbox, and not necessarily a penalty. Maybe its authority is just not high enough. You should build good links to it.
 
onlinework said:
site:domain.com - 100+ pages indexed

ranking - homepage -when I search for brand name it shows my social media pages not the domain. When I search with com it shows the website.

ahrefs: I manually checked and the website is ranking on page 9 for particular kws but these are very low kws and I have like hundreds like this. Something is obviously wrong.

I am ready to pay for a solution for this problem without revealing the website if possible.
Click to expand...
I have one domain, it is indexed, 10 months old, 200+ do-follow RD pointing to homepage, no manual actions, but does not ranking on brand.
Homepage does not ranking at all on any keywords.
Inner pages are ranking, but in low positions on easy keywords.

If you search for brand without .com - if it is brand and not generic words - your site should show up in results.
Search with .com showing sites all time - unless domain is deindexed.

So what i did - 301 to new clone site about 1 month ago.
Still do not see any progress - homepage still not ranking at all.

As one member told before - you can try this:

-Make new clone site on fresh domain.
-Deindex and 301 old to new, but only to all versions of google bot, confirm change of address in GSC.
-On a new clone site block Bing to not crawl this site (duplicate content).
 
rafark said:
If your site is older than a few months it’s not sandbox, maybe its authority is just not high enough. You should build good links to it.
Click to expand...
PA 30+ DA 45+. Clean background of strong backlinks. Bing picked it up as authority one a long time ago. I know the algorithm there is different but as I said this happened to only one of the websites. The domain has a pretty strange (catchy) name but I do not believe that affected it.
 
Smeklinis said:
I have one domain, it is indexed, 10 months old, 200+ do-follow RD pointing to homepage, no manual actions, but does not ranking on brand.
Homepage does not ranking at all on any keywords.
Inner pages are ranking, but in low positions on easy keywords.

If you search for brand without .com - if it is brand and not generic words - your site should show up in results.
Search with .com showing sites all time - unless domain is deindexed.

So what i did - 301 to new clone site about 1 month ago.
Still do not see any progress - homepage still not ranking at all.

As one member told before - you can try this:

-Make new clone site on fresh domain.
-Deindex and 301 old to new, but only to all versions of google bot, confirm change of address in GSC.
-On a new clone site block Bing to not crawl this site (duplicate content).
Click to expand...
The domain name is generic words. I am not sure if the 301 redirect will help since you have said that you did it 1 month ago. One thing I forgot to mention is that this website was affected with that 4 pages penalty like year ago. But not anymore.
 
sandbox happens for new sites and it's real. If you're doing everything by the book and your site still doesn't rank anywhere in the first few months (even if it's indexed) then you've been sandboxed
 
tazarbm said:
sandbox happens for new sites and it's real. If you're doing everything by the book and your site still doesn't rank anywhere in the first few months (even if it's indexed) then you've been sandboxed
Click to expand...
In that case, this is not a sandbox but something different.
 
onlinework said:
affected with that 4 pages penalty like year ago
Click to expand...
I had this too, recovered with 301 about after couple of months.

So, if site had that penalty, maybe it is still on?
Pages are indexed but rankings stuck.
I will do a test by domain change - it is not so many expenses.

My code for google bot only:

Code: 
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} olddomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} "AdsBot-Google|Googlebot|Googlebot-Image|Googlebot-Mobile|Googlebot-News|Googlebot/Test|Googlebot-Video|Google-HTTP-Java-Client|Mediapartners-Google" [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.newdomain.com/ [L,R=301]
 
Smeklinis said:
I had this too, recovered with 301 about after couple of months.

So, if site had that penalty, maybe it is still on?
Pages are indexed but rankings stuck.
I will do a test by domain change - it is not so many expenses.

My code for google bot only:

Code: 
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} olddomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} "AdsBot-Google|Googlebot|Googlebot-Image|Googlebot-Mobile|Googlebot-News|Googlebot/Test|Googlebot-Video|Google-HTTP-Java-Client|Mediapartners-Google" [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.newdomain.com/ [L,R=301]
Click to expand...
It doesn't have the penalty with the 4 pages anymore (6-7 months). I am just afraid to risk the Bing traffic atm and not sure what to do. Thank you for sharing the code.
 
Smeklinis said:
I have one domain, it is indexed, 10 months old, 200+ do-follow RD pointing to homepage, no manual actions, but does not ranking on brand.
Homepage does not ranking at all on any keywords.
Inner pages are ranking, but in low positions on easy keywords.

If you search for brand without .com - if it is brand and not generic words - your site should show up in results.
Search with .com showing sites all time - unless domain is deindexed.

So what i did - 301 to new clone site about 1 month ago.
Still do not see any progress - homepage still not ranking at all.

As one member told before - you can try this:

-Make new clone site on fresh domain.
-Deindex and 301 old to new, but only to all versions of google bot, confirm change of address in GSC.
-On a new clone site block Bing to not crawl this site (duplicate content).
Click to expand...
Above-It may be because of not enough nofollow links for Google's DA and too strong do follow link juice.
https://blog.linkody.com/guides/google-sandbox-guide
Google Sandbox is not a penalty, it’s a filter that Google places on new sites that have over optimized their content and/or have too many backlinks on the day when the site was indexed by Google.

First disavow links starting from the strongest but not all at once.
Do some DAS. Link to the site along with SM on existing backlinks pages if possible. Make lot of nofollow links with something copy paste from site like image, infographics or wesite description like on profile links.

Put some unique keyword in site and blast GSA type link to your tiers with that unique keywords.

Or start with a new start a new strong domain. Try to keep thing not very optimised in the begining. No index each site for the other search engine. Redirect if suitable later.
 
Last edited:
adsn said:
Above-It may be because of not enough nofollow links for Google's DA and too strong do follow link juice.
Click to expand...
I had nofollow links too (40% RDs), not only do-follows.
 
You are doing something wrong, 2 years is a long time, the sandbox is more like for brand new sites.
 
Smeklinis said:
I had nofollow links too (40% RDs), not only do-follows.
Click to expand...
I don't know but probably you need to remove some do follow links for Google and some more nofollow links.
 
Last edited:
onlinework said:
I am just afraid to risk the Bing traffic atm and not sure what to do.
Click to expand...
I think there is now risk with Bing - you will leave for it old site, only redirect google bots.
On a new clone site you will block Bing - to not have duplicate issues.

It is only risk with google - if they find you are doing such redirect.
 
Smeklinis said:
I think there is now risk with Bing - you will leave for it old site, only redirect google bots.
On a new clone site you will block Bing - to not have duplicate issues.

It is only risk with google - if they find you are doing such redirect.
Click to expand...
So basically I will have a completely new domain for Google with the same content as the old one with a 301 redirect. Meanwhile, I will keep the old one for Bing. But have you solved yours issue with the 301 redirect?
 
onlinework said:
In that case, this is not a sandbox but something different.
Click to expand...
yeah...

I only read the title of your thread and thought you were a newbie wanting to know whether sandboxing is real. I didn't bother to read your post before replying :D

My bad!
 
Forgot one thing - last line of my redirect code will redirect all old domain pages to a new domain root.
It should be something like this to redirect page-to-page:
Code: 
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.newdomain.com$1 [R=301,L]
 
onlinework said:
So basically I will have a completely new domain for Google with the same content as the old one with a 301 redirect. Meanwhile, I will keep the old one for Bing. But have you solved yours issue with the 301 redirect?
Click to expand...
Yes right.
I will register new domain with almost same name (if .com), or same name but different TLD for this test.

As i told, with 301 i solved 4 results index penalty for 2 sites (of course on a new domains i changed a little bit content to not get penalty again).
On 1 domain which was not ranking on homepage and brand - still no success - but redirect made about 1 month ago only.
 
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