Google Sand boxed?
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Since early March I have been slowing moving up the SERP for my site http://amplereviews.com/. At around the end of March I have reached the top 5 rankings for every keyword I had targeted. Maybe a week or so later the keywords I have been targeting disappeared from the rankings. Now I am here today stuck in the ~600s for at least 2 weeks. So have I been sand boxed? And If so what should I do?
PS. My rankings on Yahoo and Bing are still in their usual range.
Domain is 3 months old.
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Hi Blaze,
the first sensation I have, but I urge you to not take it as it was a definitive answer, is that your site has suffered a Panda penalization.
What makes me think so, it's the extremely high presence of ads above the fold. And if this is quite evident for me with a screen resolution of 1920*1080 pixels, if you reduce to a more standard resolution, it is totally true.
For instance, take this post: http://amplereviews.com/hcg-ultra-diet-drops/
Well... the first bar from the left is all for ads, the second bar - then - has another ad block under the "Recent Posts" widget. Finally, the body have:
- An Ad Block just under the Title of the post;
- A second Ad Block almost at the middle of the post
- at least a couple of what seem being affiliate links
In a 1024*769 screen resolution (still the most popular), what can be defined as real "not advertsiment" content is reduced to a couple of lines...
Surely, this "ad pollution" is not enough to justify a Panda update penalty, but it is a strong Panda factor as it is well explained in these posts by Danny Sullivan and Adam Audette.
Said that, I tested with tools.pingdom.com the upload speed of your site, as I was founding it slow. And it is very slow indeed: almost 60'' to completely render in a browser page! I would check out if that is a template issue or an hosting one. Page Speed is one the ranking factors, even though not one of the top ranking factors.
Then, I found out a weird thing. If I click on a tag (for instance "hgc ultra diet drops") I'm not taken to the tag page (http://amplereviews.com/tag/hcg-ultra-diet-drops/) but to a totally different page (http://amplereviews.com/rushfit-review/), as if there was a 301 or 302 acting. Remember that filling a site of internal redirections is not the best way of treating Googlebot, as you are obliging it in spend more time than the needed to crawl your site, and this can consume the so called "budget crawl" with the result that your site may end with indexation issues.
Finally, I would also look at the nature of the domains linking to you (148 unique domains names accordingly to MajesticSEO, zero for OSE, which has not crawled it yet... ) Are they quality links, or for poor quality sites?
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Are you set up with Google webmaster tools & analytics?
Tell us more about how you achieved these rankings, what is your current SEO plan?
Google no longer has a sandbox but it does have a penalty of you do any sort of black hat type of SEO
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