hhhhh Sandbox :/

[tiburon]

Hey

It seems my site is in google's sandbox.
Two months ago my PR dropped from 4 to 2 and the forum from 3 to 0. But the SERPS weren't affected (yet).

Maybe someone will tell me why this happened.

1) Hostgator was a hell for me since autumn 2008. Several visitors reported that they cannot see the site a couple of hours every day (some 1-2 hours, others 4-6 hours). The hosting company told me its the fault of the Internet Service Providers and their filters and they told me to check the site thru' pagewash.com and see it is online 99% of the time. Yeah it was up but after I went to Philippines I couldn't access it everyday for 4-5 hours. So what about my country ISPs? Maybe it was hostgators fault.

2) Someone on a forum sold PR5 link from a joomla forum very very cheap and I bought 2 links. Maybe someone reported me or something?

3) VBSEO - I have this on my forum. It really helped me a couple of years. Im not sure but I heard someone else reported their PR dropped lately and they had vbseo.

I really hope its the first1 problem and I will be able to recover in the next 6 months.
Maybe google could not 'see' my site everyday :/

Two weeks ago I finally changed my host and bought a dedicated server in my country.

[Ridge]

Post or PM me the url please and ill check it out

[Michael Martinez]

Toolbar PR doesn't usually mean anything, although sudden dramatic drops often indicate some sort of penalty was invoked. Google's Toolbar PR penalties, however, usually have no teeth. It's just a verbal reprimand, so-to-speak, that doesn't affect your rankings or search visibility.

A site would have to depend almost entirely on paid links (that would have to be discovered) for Google to actually take a punitive action against the site buying links. Too many people have tried to Googlebowl their competitors by buying thousands of links. Google seems to be on to that trick (although I believe the gambling verticals do receive more human scrutiny from Googlers than most verticals).

Usually you get penalized for what you do on your site or in your linking profile. They are looking for egregious, consistent, well-patterned, blatant, obvious behavior.

Buying 2 links does not fall into that category.


The access issue is not related to anything going on with search engines. There are tools that help you test NOC (Network Operations Center) performance and determine if your server is in a good location. You should run traceroute tests from multiple locations to see how many hops it takes and how long it takes between hops to get from the traceroute testing tools to your site.

A typically "good" hop time is usually less than 10 milliseconds. If you're seeing hundreds of milliseconds per hop you're looking at a choke point. Often enough ISPs have router issues that go undetected for days, weeks, or months and they cause problems for Web publishers and surfers alike.

Some ISPs do throttle their surfers' activity. If you want to see whether that is happening, get the IP addresses for people who complain about inaccessibility and run traceroutes from your server to their IP addresses. You'll see where the bottlenecks occur. Quite often a user goes through 2-4 servers before actually leaving an ISP's network.


My gut feeling suggests you'll probably want to move your server at some point, but you should exercise due diligence before hitting the panic button.

Also, if you're running an active forum on a shared hosting account, you're probably overloading the server and need to switch to a dedicated solution. It could also be that one of your server neighbors is the resource hog.

[Buypokerlinks.com]

Usually PR aren't affected by downtime.

My guess is that either you have lost some strong inlinks, or you have been reported to sell links. This can have your visible pagerank lowered.

[tiburon]

I sent a reconsideration request.

Anyways, should I be worried about these errors?
Is there anything I should do besides removing the link to them ... where is possible? (cause some links are not on my sites or some are forum posts where I cannot understand the problem)...

Robots.txt should be modified?!

[Unknown Webmaster]

I don't know how big of an impact those errors have, since I always go trough them and fix anything that looks like it may be even remotely important on my site.

The thought behind this is that a lot of them can't be good for SEO (like dead links and errors in the sitemap), and a good deal of them can certainly be annoying for the user. In addition - If you keep the number of errors down to a minimum, it is much easier to spot it if a serious error occurs, since it will not blend in with hundreds of "normal" errors.

[tiburon]

My sitemap doesnt have any dead link

Some are links to sections that doesnt exist anymore... and they are posted on random blogs or sites (not mine)

[CK]

From that image your sitemap does have url errors. Go through your sitemap and correct them. I would be looking at the other links to find out which pages are throwing off http errors and those that are coming up unreachable. Understand people can link to you and make mistakes doing so, but its the stuff in green you need to look at as well not just dead links (although if you've got bad links you def want to fix those to.)

Use the Detailed links google provides ( highlighted in red) to see where the errors are coming from then fix them or find out why. btw if your using the wordpress sitemap generator Ive noticed it to be a bit buggy at times creating the wrong urls. Not always but its done it enough that Im looking for an alternative solution

damn it wont let me remove the other image...anyway submitting another one thats cropped for you

*Side note - I would fix your heading tags. You have 6 on your homepage and 15+ h1 tags on your rakeback page. You should use your h1 tag as the title of the page ( 1 per page) and h2 tags for subheadings*

[Unknown Webmaster]

If the links to your site are worth "anything" I would make redirects, so Google and potential visitors, who follow those links, are sent to your new pages.

Odds are that those links are totally irrelevant, but if some of them were good links, it could have something to do with it - UnknownWebmaster.com got PR1 on the last update, and I don't remember getting anything but random blog comment links to it.

[Michael Martinez]

tiburon, if your site is still not appearing in the Google SERPs after 7 months it IS penalized --OR-- you did something really technically incorrect and Google cannot get to it. Randy offered to look at your site back in May. If he did that and didn't find anything obvious, PM me with the URL and I'll take a quick look. I cannot promise anything.

Kaus and unknown Webmaster suggested you fix those errors, at least by implementing redirects. If you did not do that, you should.

If you send me your URL, tell me everything you did to promote the site. I will not judge you. I will not disclose to anyone else what you reveal to me. I'll offer you an opinion.

And I hope people understand that I don't have a lot of time to look at sites. I don't mind doing it on occasion. Usually all I can offer is an opinion anyway. And my opinion will be no better than what I know about any particular site.