57 replies to this topic

[Grumpus]

I'm seeing the same with the Blogs I follow. How interesting.....

Don't tell anyone, though. It's a secret.

G.

[Deverill]

It's definitely not just a sandbox issue. My charter fishing guy's site has not changed substantially in over a year. Itsy bitsy little tweeks but nothing more than a paragraph in all that time. When Florida happened his site dropped to 140-220 range for the main keyword phrase, as well as several other variations on that phrase. Other SEs had us at sub-20's and even a few in the top 5.

Today his main keyword phrase went from 141 to 20 while a couple others went to #1, #2, #4 and various things no higher than 28 for those I track with only one exception. He's number 67 for "Florida charter boat" and considering the competition I'm quite happy (not satisfied but happy) with it.

Note, no significant changes in over a year. The site has been under my control since July 2003 and has existed since November 1998... certainly not a sandbox scenario as I understand it.

I just hope this stays like this for awhile! Thanks especially to Jill and others here who preach "Don't follow the fads, just make a good page with good content that a customer would benefit from and leave it alone." You saved me many hours of frustration - I basically made it good and left it alone and it seems to have paid off... now if I can just make it awesome! Thanks again, guys and gals!

Edit: The change in rank was not today as I seem to be saying - I just noticed it today.

[qwerty]

I can't be sure yet, but it looks like many blogs and "article" type sites (or at least pages in those sites) are in the process of being moved over to Google News and out of the regular SERPs. I guess it sort of makes sense - if you want timely information (which blogs and article sites tend to provide) then you would search on a news search engine. If you are looking for timeless and factual information, you'd use a regular search engine.

I just got one of those "Google Alerts" searching the news for one of my keyword phrases. The page that came up is a guest book. Does this mean all the trash is being moved to Google News?

[Jill]

Definitely not "just" a sandbox issue. I'm curious if it's a sandbox issue at all.

It seems to be in many cases sites coming back from Florida or Gladys.

[tempy]

Florida or Gladys???

[amabaie]

Other possibilities: Google has removed the sandbox compeltely, and/or other specific penalties to reduce the computing power spent on these?

[josh1r]

I just got bumped back up as well. I had written a few days ago, see here, about how a couple of my sites all but disappeared from top 10/20 in Google. Just today though they came back (not quite as high as they were but at least they are back and are top 20/30).

[arlen]

Other possibilities:  Google has removed the sandbox compeltely, ...

I don't think so or at least hope not ... I'm still way back on Google. Gotta get links, gotta get links (grrrrr)

[OldWelshGuy]

Google also seems to be favouring forums, which makes sense as a good forum is a lot harder to build than a directory, and the content tends to be topic specific. (although this will become the next spam target lol)

[tharmon]

I am glade that all of you are seeing better results.

I lost 2 of my 5 sites to the update for my key word from 1st page to 5th page.

I do not believe it has anything to do with Sandbox filter being removed because the sites I lost are the sites I have been working the hardest on to improve the back links and I have been adding fresh content every week. I have hundreds of back links and tons of content compared to some of the sites that took the place of my old web sites.

Any other theories?

I have noticed that most of the sites that have high ranking now have not been cached this week.

[oneofthe3lions]

I submitted one site to google and it was pr-d in a cple of months, havent seen evidence of sandboxing myself if that actually means no pr. (rankings being a different thing). perhaps it depends on the authority of the first few links that point to you or something..?

No moves for my main sites main phrases, mind you , cant get higher than 1st can ya?

[Jill]

The "sandbox" or "aging filter" has nothing to do with PR.

What is the phrase you show up for? Something not too competitive?

[randfish]

From what I can see, the filter we formerly called 'sandbox', which I regarded as the filter that made sites with higher links, PR, better allinanchor, etc. and top rankings @ Yahoo!, MSN & Teoma appear nowhere in the top 50-100 at Google is over.

The sites I've seen people complain about dropping 10-30 positions since Saturday appear to be ranking normally, similiarly to their positions at Yahoo! & MSN. THey also appear to hav fewer links or worse allinanchor, etc. than the top competition.

On the other side, the 12 or so sites I knew of and believed to be 'heavily' sandboxed (70% or more socre with the detection tool) are out and ranking first page - many in the #1-3 positions. I obviously don't know enough to say that the sandbox is over for everyone, but it appears that some filter was released.

Last, I also noticed that many of the spam pages that were ranking well for SERPs I monitor have dropped out of the rankings, which is excellent news for the overall quality of results, and suggests to me that Google found a good, long-term fix that pushed out spam and pushed up sites that deserved to rank. This also makes me believe these changes will be long-term.

Congrats to everyone who's done a good job and is finally being rewarded for it!

[tharmon]

New Releases Dropped From Google For Key Words

The other thing I noticed besides 50% of my sites dropping was that all of my news releases that were ranked in the top 11-50 results, for key words, are also gone.

[InetBranding]

Moved up from #4 to #1 over the weekend for main keyword on one of my sites, now I'm down to #3.