Google Sandbox Questions/Solution?

All right, so I've been building niche sites for a long time now, almost a year, and I've never ran into this problem. I need some opinions and advice from those of you who have also experienced this same issue. I'll get into the details below:

I've gotten really good at SEO and analyzing the 1st page of Google for a certain keyword phrase to see if I can rank on it or not. I setup niche sites with exact match domains and proper on-page SEO and they ALWAYS get indexed on one of the first 3 pages, usually page 1 or 2. They will fluctuate for a little while due to the Google Dance, but they always come back and then some normal off-page SEO gets them to page 1.

I have done this countless times without fail, but over a week ago, I ran into a problem which I feel is the "Sandbox" and I need to know how to get out of it if I can.

I bought 6 new exact match domains and built 6 WP blogs on them using the same strategies I always do. All the proper on-page SEO was done (keyword in title, meta tags, description, etc.), and the first page competition is weak. I know that even a brand new site should be ranking somewhere on pages 1-2 due to the exact match domain and on-page SEO.

Anyway, all 6 of those sites are indexed according to Google, but they are not showing up anywhere in even the first 10 pages for my keyword phrase when normally my sites always index high up if I did good keyword research.

Normally I wouldn't be concerned if it was just a site or two, but since all 6 of them are nowhere to be found, and they are indexed, it's a bit suspicious to me.

I know the first thing most of you will ask is about the competition, but I can assure you it's very weak as I did all the research before selecting these keywords.

My only guess is that I got all 6 of these sites sandboxed for some reason, but I'm not sure why. I haven't done any aggressive linkbuilding or even added Adsense yet so they can't think they are MFA sites.

Do you think maybe Google is catching onto me and see that almost every site under my IP is a niche site so they are just not ranking the new ones I build? I don't know of any other reasons.

So those of you that have experienced this, what do you think it is and what's the solution here?

Thanks for the help.

You said that your site is indexed. Is your site showing up if you search using this operator?

If yes, How many indexed links does Yahoo Site Explorer shows up?

If its more than 1000, then how many of your backlinks are from PR 5 and above sites?

If its more than 5 PR 5 and above backlinks, are those links indexed?

If yes, then how many links from web 2.0 sites are pointing to your site?

Have you Pinged and bookmarked your sites?

Have you added your site in webmaster tools?

How many pages do your sites have? If you have a lot of thin, niche sites, this may be the problem.

@ bezopravin: Yeah my site shows up when I use the site:domain.com code. That's how I know it's indexed.

Also, the sites are still fairly new so no links are showing up yet. I've pinged and bookmarked them and I have a WP plugin that builds a sitemap and submits it so all that stuff is taken care of.

I don't expect them to be ranking very high right now or anything, I just don't understand why they are absolutely nowhere to be found on the first 10 pages for the keyword phrase even though I know I did everything right and I've done this countless times before with my other sites without any problems.


@ polo: All of the sites I build have the required pages (privacy policy, about us, contact us) and then they have about 3-4 posts each. I suppose that might be considered "thin" to some, but I've seen a lot of sites out there ranking with only 1 post and not even the necessary pages.

I've also never had this happen to me in the past even with thinner sites. Another thing to note, my older sites that were already indexed and ranking are still holding their ranking just fine, so those haven't been deindexed or sandboxed or anything. It's just the past 6 that I made.

I'm thinking maybe I need to open a new hosting account for all the sites I build from here on out so they are on different IPs than my current ones. Assuming that's the problem anyway....

Yeah I would reckon you need to use different IPs. I wouldn't add all your sites to google webmaster tools. Also I have started to use buy privacy for the domains as this happened to me. Ever since I diversified I havn't had the problem.

Shaneod21 said:

Yeah I would reckon you need to use different IPs. I wouldn't add all your sites to google webmaster tools. Also I have started to use buy privacy for the domains as this happened to me. Ever since I diversified I havn't had the problem.

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Well I don't manually add my site to Google Webmaster Tools or anything, I'm not sure if the plugin I use does or not. I know it builds the sitemap to be crawled by Google. It's the Google XML Sitemaps Plugin, you've probably heard of it.

Does making the domains private really help with this? I thought that was just so other users can't find you. Don't the search engines still know that it's your site and IP though?

Its nothing to do with plugins. Your site is probably doing a "google dance". Don't panic and build links all of a sudden. Just leave it as it is for a few days and I am pretty sure it will come back to its deserved position after a few days/weeks. Just continue to build more Niche sites. : )

Seomachine said:

Its nothing to do with plugins. Your site is probably doing a "google dance". Don't panic and build links all of a sudden. Just leave it as it is for a few days and I am pretty sure it will come back to its deserved position after a few days/weeks. Just continue to build more Niche sites. : )

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Normally when sites do the "Google Dance", they would have been somewhere in the results to begin with though. It's not like my sites were showing up one day and they were gone the next - what happened was they got indexed, but never even showed up anywhere in the results for the keyword phrase.

I checked if they were indexed by doing the site:domain.com query in Google and it's telling me they are indexed.

I've experienced the Google Dance with a ton of sites in the past and this is much different which is why I was thinking it was the sandbox.

I guess I'll give it a few more days and see what happens.

By exact domain, do you mean the "exact" keyword on your domain? For example if your keyword is best buy car. The domain is bestbuycar.com? or you can also do bestbuycarnow.com, bestbuycarfast.com?

peter73 said:

By exact domain, do you mean the "exact" keyword on your domain? For example if your keyword is best buy car. The domain is bestbuycar.com? or you can also do bestbuycarnow.com, bestbuycarfast.com?

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Yeah I mean the domain is my exact keyword with nothing else added to it. So in your example, it would be bestbuycar.com

Overoptimized, thin sites are getting banned by google. There are lots of threads about microniche sites being penalized after caffeine update. I think you should add more content to see if that helps.

J1218 said:

Yeah I mean the domain is my exact keyword with nothing else added to it. So in your example, it would be bestbuycar.com

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How about domains like bestbuycarfast.com? Are you successful with that kind of domains? Wherein "exact keyword" + additional keyword (dot) com

peter73 said:

How about domains like bestbuycarfast.com? Are you successful with that kind of domains? Wherein "exact keyword" + additional keyword (dot) com

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I normally try to avoid those as I've heard and found myself that exact domains with nothing added to or before them seem to rank the best.

I do have one site that has an extra keyword added to it at the front of the domain and it seems to be doing OK, but I've done a lot of SEO to the site so that probably has more to do with the ranking.

Stop Created Backlink to your site , Update 3 Times a day with Random Time ( like work from human ) and wait !

Are these sites interlinked, or all on Google Analytics? Do they all have the same backlink sources?

Or same theme and plugins on each site?

deviatus said:

Are these sites interlinked, or all on Google Analytics? Do they all have the same backlink sources?

Or same theme and plugins on each site?

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They are not interlinked but I do have Google Analytics on them all. I hear some people say to not use GA on all your sites, but the problem is, most of what I do is flipping these sites and almost all buyers want to see a verified Google Analytics attachment on Flippa if they are going to make a serious bid.

With how easy it is to fake screenshots these days, buyers on Flippa trust seeing a verified GA attachment way more than they do an AW Stats attachment or some other tracking program. This in turn determines the final selling price of my sites.

I mainly use the same theme for my Adsense sites (the Clickbump theme) because I've found it to get me the best CTR. I make sure that I customize each one differently though with different color schemes, pictures, etc. Not every single site I own uses that same theme though, only the Adsense ones. I use a different theme for my Clickbank sites.

Also, yes they all have the same plugins, but I need all of those plugins so I don't have much choice there.

J1218 said:

They are not interlinked but I do have Google Analytics on them all. I hear some people say to not use GA on all your sites, but the problem is, most of what I do is flipping these sites and almost all buyers want to see a verified Google Analytics attachment on Flippa if they are going to make a serious bid.

With how easy it is to fake screenshots these days, buyers on Flippa trust seeing a verified GA attachment way more than they do an AW Stats attachment or some other tracking program. This in turn determines the final selling price of my sites.

I mainly use the same theme for my Adsense sites (the Clickbump theme) because I've found it to get me the best CTR. I make sure that I customize each one differently though with different color schemes, pictures, etc. Not every single site I own uses that same theme though, only the Adsense ones. I use a different theme for my Clickbank sites.

Also, yes they all have the same plugins, but I need all of those plugins so I don't have much choice there.

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You could try using Statpress to track your stats, and right before you want to sell, add GA.

Or use multiple GA accounts.

One more question; do these sites have the same registrar info, or is it private? Are they on the same IP?

It's it "no" to both of those, I'm pretty sure it's the GA curse.

deviatus said:

You could try using Statpress to track your stats, and right before you want to sell, add GA.

Or use multiple GA accounts.

One more question; do these sites have the same registrar info, or is it private? Are they on the same IP?

It's it "no" to both of those, I'm pretty sure it's the GA curse.

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I think I'll just start using multiple GA accounts. Not like they cost anything...

Most of the sites have the same registrar info, yeah. I register all of my sites on either Namecheap or GoDaddy (mainly GoDaddy though) and I don't do the private registration since it's like another $7 per year and when you buy a ton of domains, that starts to add up.

Up until now, all of my sites are on the same IP. I think I am going to open another hosting account and start all my sites from here on out under that account so it's a different IP.

How many sites do you think is too much for one IP?

Great thread!! I'm learning so much here...thanks all...

J1218 said:

I think I'll just start using multiple GA accounts. Not like they cost anything...

Most of the sites have the same registrar info, yeah. I register all of my sites on either Namecheap or GoDaddy (mainly GoDaddy though) and I don't do the private registration since it's like another $7 per year and when you buy a ton of domains, that starts to add up.

Up until now, all of my sites are on the same IP. I think I am going to open another hosting account and start all my sites from here on out under that account so it's a different IP.

How many sites do you think is too much for one IP?

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Yeah, what I do is have multiple low cost shared hosting accounts, and rotate. Can always do seo hosting, but I think that's overhyped. On a hostgator shared ip, for example, there will be 1000+ sites. Now if one of those sites gets a penalty, there's no way G will penalize all those sites. But having shared IP is just one more red flag.

About your reg info, you can always use internet.bs, they have 7.50 domains with free privacy. Or use completely different info on each namecheap domain, and if you ever get asked (I never have) just say you were making them for different clients, so they needed different info.