Today I would like to post about a SEO problem that hundreds of newbies, when starting, and even some bloggers that have been blogging for some months can face.

This problem can lead to a dead blog and broke blogging dreams. I’m talking about the Google Sandbox.

Before starting, don’t panic, as it’s a problem that can be solved. If you’re facing it, it may take some time to return to a normal status, but you will.

Said so, let’s start.

Google Sandbox

What’s Google Sandbox?

The Google Sandbox effect is a drop on Google Search Engine rankings for some keywords, losing all the organic traffic from Google because of the pages that got removed from Google index.

Why does it happen?

It’s spam prevention.

It can happen because of various reasons:

- Google won’t show a site until it proves itself to be worth to be displayed on the rankings.

- A new site suddenly got thousands of backlinks on a very short timeframe.

- Duplicate / not original content.

How to now my site is Sanboxed?

If you suddenly see a drop on search rankings results, a drop on pages indexed and traffic received from Google, then your blog is under the Google Sandbox effects. There’s no direct way to know it apart from the unexpected drop.

How to avoid it?

Now that you know what’s the Google sandbox effect, you must be wondering if there’s a way to avoid it, and if so, how to do it.

Yes, there’s a way to avoid to be sandboxed and to recover your rankings after it.

The way to avoid it has some coincidences with the way to be a successful blogger:

- Unique and valuable content

- Avoiding links farm and massive backlinks reception in short timeframe

- Proper use of nofollow dofollow tags

Yes, that simple. Remember that the Sandbox is just the way that Google prevents spam, so there’s nothing special you should do to avoid it if you play fair.

How get out of Google Sandbox?

It depends. If you suddenly received tons of backlinks, there’s nothing else to do than wait, because receiving a massive amount of backlinks can confuse Google, considering that your site is using black hat techniques.

Using the Google reconsideration request may work too.

If your site isn’t appearing in Google search results, or it’s performing more poorly than it once did (and you believe that it does not violate our webmaster guidelines), you can ask Google to reconsider your site.

It may take a few weeks, but it can work. Before submitting the consideration, make sure you’ve check your site, checked all your pages and have fixed the mistakes, else it would be useless to submit it.

I started the post saying that it may lead a blogger to stop blogging, as after all the efforts made on the blog it suddenly drop on search rankings. Don’t panic, everything can be fixed!

Thanks for reading.