The Google Sandbox Survey

I've recently had a number of sites that have fallen from page one into the 600+ positions of Google. And after spending a long time looking for a reason as to why... I haven't found a good answer.

Which is why I've setup the Google Sandbox Survey!
Click Here to Go Take The Survey
(It's only 14 questions)

Who should take it?
Did you have a website in the top 3 pages of Google? Is it now hanging out in the 200+ positions? Take the survey!

Why should you take it?
Look at all the threads on here about sites dropping out of the top three pages of Google. Does anyone have a definite answer that is based on actual data? - I haven't seen one.

Survey Results Can Be Found Here:
Click Here to See The Results So Far

NOTE: The intent of all of this is to help this entire community. Lots of people, myself included, have lost a lot of traffic from Google. It would be really cool if we could get some data as to what is happening. Your time will be worth it even if we can gather just a few clues, trends, or whatever you want to call them.

PS:
If you have any questions, if I missed something important in the survey, etc... Let me know!

Just checked... thanks for whoever who has already taken the time to fill it out. And again, let me know if I missed something important.

Btw, how much do you want to bet that these results will be packaged up and sold on Warrior Forum lol

Great idea. I`ve shared my painfully sad experience.

BTW, maybe you should add a question "Did you have a lot of your backlinks lost (removed) before the sandbox?" Because I think that was the main reason for my penalty...

Simas9 said:

Great idea. I`ve shared my experience.

BTW, maybe you should add a question "Have you had a lot of your backlinks lost (removed) before the sandbox?" Because I think that was the main reason for my penalty...

Click to expand...

Good idea!

By the way, I would like to summarize any problems with ads, but I don't know the best way to do it.

I know that adsense is not the problem because I do not do adsense on any of my websites. But I think that there might be something to do with the amount of redirects or the way that you're doing a redirect. Not too sure.

All I know is that when you run a plugin such as 'Pretty Links' in wordpress for redirecting to affiliate offers, it has conflicts in Google Webmaster tools. I told Pretty links to set my links to no-follow and that is what created the issue. After all, I don't want Google following my redirects to the affiliate pages.

That is why I've switched off Pretty Links and went to to acloaker.com's .php redirects for practically all my sites. One more thing that could clear up a potential issue.

***

EDIT:
Ok, I've added a new question about links being removed. Keep in mind, this question will be about 4 responses short (people who have already done the survey). But hopefully we will get enough responses to dilute that.

I don`t believe that this thread looks almost dead. What?

Great Idea, took the survey. Hopefully more will chime in and this will gather some results to work off of.

Trends seem a bit difficult to see yet, but here is what I'm noticing.

• Home page word count.
• Anchor text variation.
• Link velocity. I didn't know how to measure this, but the links/day question is a bit open ended. It does not gauge how many links are being built in the life time of the site or what rate at what point.
• Another area that didn't get covered was the frequency of updates on the website. I have some websites that have lots of updates and some that have none. Both types of sites rank on page one.
• Also, forgot to talk about deep-linking in the survey

I'm finding that Anchor text variation is what has hammered me in recent Google updates. I put a lot of work into a small number of high paying keywords - too much. Google spotted it and punished.

So now it's back to the drawing board with a much wider pool of links anchors and more frequent internal linking.

I will bump this thread. Seems like a very nice idea. I wonder why only so few people interested in this :baby09:

Nice idea, good to have something solid to base opinions on.

It seems like its just confirming the usual advice for avoiding sanbox - be careful of new domains.

Also, there appears to be a trend of over-optimization arising, combined with heavy anchor text usage its no wonder the participants sites were sandboxed.