Why does my site get sandboxed but this one doesn't?

[BrianJenkins]

I'm currently working on an entire website redesign and restructuring.  My current website is extremely spammy.  I really worked on it before I knew much about SEO.  Now that I have a better foundation I have been remaking my site to get rid of duplicate content and to have a much better UX.  With this said, I still depend on the current site to bring in my income while I'm working on getting my new site up.

Google seems to constantly kick me out for about a month at a time and then let me back in.  The few other times I thought it was because the new site I have been working on is on a different domain and was exactly the same for a while (I don't want google to find this new domain it's just for testing purposes).  So I removed the new domain from google and in a couple weeks my main site was back in.  Problem is yesterday google hit me again.  I'm out of google for all my search terms.  Before I was ranking on the first page for just about every "keyword + city" phrase I was trying to rank for.

I can find plenty of reasons why google would give me problems with my current site.  For example I have TONS of duplicate pages with just the keyword/city changed.  Pretty spammy.  I did buy about 5 links a year ago or so but they are pretty nothing sites.

My question is if google's going to ban me why don't they just do it?  They keep taking me out and putting me back in.  No messages in webmaster tools.  My domain is below:

http://yourmusiclessons.com

Also when I just started out I got the idea of "keyword + city" from a competitor that ranks for EVERYTHING which is also found below:

http://www.musikalessons.com

All of the links I bought were the same links the above site bought.  I tried buying a link from classical.net which has a high page rank and links to musikalessons.com on each page of their site.  As soon as google found the links, I was kicked out.  I had them remove it.  My question is musika has basically the same "spammyness" as me just on a much larger scale and yet they never seem to be kicked out of google and still rank high.

I've thought about reporting musika, but I'm afraid Google will ban me as well because my site is just as bad.  Again I'm working all day on fixing my site and doing a 180, it's just taking a long time and I can't launch quite yet.  I live off the income from my current site though, so it's very disheartening when this happens.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!

[jenmcardle]

Hi Brian,

As you stated, your site has numerous issues so it is expected that Google is not ranking your site well. There are various factors which can affect the bounce in SERPs you described. Your site can be incurring a manual penalty which causes your site to lose it's rankings. Later, the manual penalty expires causing the site rankings to return, and then the manual penalty is re-applied causing you to lose rankings again. That is one possibility.

Another possibility relates to your site's indexing. If Google finds a duplicate site as you described, they may rank the other site instead of your site. As Google indexes your site over a crawl cycle (roughly 30 days) they could locate issues which affect your rankings. Without a detailed review of your WMT and Analytics data, it is impossible to really nail down the exact cause. You know there are numerous issues with the site and you have correctly identified the need to fix these issues.

Some penalties such as Panda are applied only on specific intervals which may add to what appears to be random changes.

Regarding your competitor's site, there are numerous possibilities there as well. Your competitor's site is more credible. For example, they have a A+ rating from the BBB. This factor along with others may lend credibility to that site evading the issue impacting your website. There are just too many possibilities to offer a definitive answer and we are left to guess.

I hope this information is helpful.