Google Deindexing vs. Sandbox/Dancing
By: John Elder posted in Adsense
Hello good people!
I’m running a little behind today and I apologize for the delay in getting out today’s article. Thursday is the day each week when I sit down and handle all the crappy administrative things from all my various businesses; things like paying bills, doing payroll, talking with the accountants and lawyers, calling banks, and putting out any fires from the previous week.
I feel like it’s better to deal with all that nonsense on one day instead of a little bit each day!
Well the Black Friday / Cyber Monday magic has seemingly wore off. It was a good run while it lasted! Yesterday’s Adsense earnings plummeted to $58 (from $116 the day before) and Amazon commissions were a poultry $2 off of $27 worth of sales. I sort of expected a drop after the crazy holiday shopping start…every market needs to take a deep breath and a step back from time to time.
I’ll post last months final numbers, just as soon as I put the data together. Earnings definitely shot up from last months panda disaster. Stay tuned for more in the next couple of days.
Today I want to talk about something that confuses a lot of people, both newbies even veterans alike.
Google Deindexing
The worst feeling in the world is putting a lot of time and effort (and sometimes expense) into building an Adsense site only to see Google ban you from their search engine. Losing the thousands of free site visitors that are no longer streaming to your site really sucks. Most times they won’t even tell you why.
But Deindexing is different than what we call the “Google Dance”. The dance is when your site is ranked high for a particular keyword, let’s say in the top 10. Then suddenly your site gets knocked back to the 597th rank or worse.
Google fluctuates constantly. As they update their algorithm, and even just as new sites are created and enter the index, there’s a constant fluid updating that goes on. Just because your site is ranked well today doesn’t mean you will be tomorrow.
Dancing is NOT deindexing
Most people see their site go from spot 4 to spot 800 and think that Google has deindexed their site, but that’s incorrect. As long as your site still shows up SOMEWHERE in Google, you haven’t been deindexed.
Here’s a simple trick to see if your site has been deindexed. Go to Google and type this in, all one word with no spaces:
site:yoursite.com
Obviously replace “yoursite.com” with the URL of your website. For instance, I would type in site:marketingfool.com If your site pops up in the listings, then you are in Google’s index and everything is ok.
If nothing appears when you run that search, then you know your site has been deindexed.
What to do if the axe has fallen?
If your site HAS been deindexed, there’s nothing you can do. If you have a Google webmaster tools account, you can log in and file a reconsideration request, but I’ve never heard of anyone who did that and actually got any relief.
Basically you have to just move on. The good news is that you can still get some site traffic from Yahoo and Bing, in some cases you can actually get quite a lot of traffic if you get lucky. But just realize that your site will never appear in Google again.
On the other hand, if your site is merely dancing, then just relax. If your site was in the top ten last week, and is sitting at the 596th spot today, then chances are you’ll pop back into that top ten position in the future. It might be next week, it might be three months later. No one can explain or predict the Google Sandbox dance.
When it happens to me, I ignore it, and then I…
Keep on building!
-John
The Marketing Fool!
