Sandboxed websites are considered to be sites that have in some way violated Google’s policies in terms of search engine optimization (SEO). The following takes a look at the reasons why websites get penalized and how one can avoid getting placed in Google’s sandbox.
Google’s Sandbox
It is uncommon for Google to permanently ban a website; rather a website can be penalized (sandboxed) for a period of time. In this time a website must be reordered and fit the SEO criteria expected of Google. Once sandboxed, your site’s ranking in search engines will decline rapidly. Once sandboxed, you need to reconstruct your search engine marketing strategy and conform to Google’s policies. Google often sends a warning to a website that contains unjust actions or material before sandboxing the site – though this may not always occur.
Banned and Penalized Websites
A banned website will not be pulled from the internet server and viewed amongst search engines. Therefore, the sites do not get ranked by Google for any keywords that are typed into the search engine. In fact, the sites will not be indexed whatsoever. A penalized website is not banned from search engines. The site is placed in Google’s sandbox for a period of time. Here the site loses its page rankings and positioning within a search engine. Your site will not be ranked for the keywords you desire. This does not mean your site is pulled off the server and cannot be viewed. Your site can still be viewed yet not triggered by your users’ keyword searches and it will not appear in the search results.
Reasons for Website Sandboxing
- One reason websites get sandboxed is due to their short-term domain registration.
- Scam, spam and fraud domains normally are registered for short term periods.
- Your site will get a lower ranking for a short-term domain registration as Google has less trust in your site.
- Do not use black hat SEO techniques i.e. unethical SEO practices
- Duplicating your blogging content is also penalized even if they are of different category.
- Google dislikes the buying and selling of links therefore Google devalues your site if it detects this activity.
- Buying links for your site in order to increase your page ranking may lead to penalization.
- Hidden links or content may lead to banning not penalization.
- Hidden links and content are created by wrapping them around a “zero font tag” and cannot be easily detected by Google.
- The overuse of keywords or irrelevant keywords leads to penalization.
- Penalization occurs when your website contains automated or doorway pages. These offer roots to other web pages and confuse the search engine.
- Do not link to sites that have a page rank of zero, these sites are not banned as of yet but are not trusted by Google.
- A website that does not conform to Google’s webmaster guidelines will be penalized or even banned from search engines.
- Do not link to sites with a lower page rank than yours
- It is very common to get penalized by working with link building campaigns on your website.
- These link trains create more backlinks which is why they are so appealing, yet they are harmful to your posts or website.
Conclusion
The only solution to not get banned or sandboxed by Google is to keep a clean website and not overtly or unlawfully manipulate your content of the structure of your website. The most important this is to stay away from Black Hat SEO Techniques i.e. unethical SEO.
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