How I Got My Blog Out Of Google Sandbox In Two Days

[activetrader]

There's been a lot of controversial information about the existence of Google sandbox. Some people believe in it, some don't but we all know once Google decides to penalize a blog, it is nearly impossible to get it back to rank on Google.

In case you believe in Google sandbox, or maybe you just don't see your traffic coming from Google at all, which means it's not finding you, here is what I did with one of my blogs that resulted in it being on the first page of Google for some odd long tail keywords in just two days and you can try it too.


I have one blog with lots of PLR content, so because there is lots of duplicate content on it, obviously that blog got penalized (sandboxed).


In the recent PR update I noticed that oddly enough Google granted my blog a page rank, so I decided to actually post some decent unique content.


I wrote a long article that invited people to comment and sign up for comments. I was specifically asking for opinions on the article. I contacted some people on facebook , in blogging directories, and personal friends inviting them to come and comment. It took some begging and bribing for comments with a link luv but as a result, lots of people posted quality, very long meaningful comments.


I also auto submitted my blog feed and also comment feed in multiple feed directories.


After I got a decent number of comments I submitted that blog post to social bookmarking sites.


Two days later I noticed a surge in Google traffic to that particular blog post. So I guess that worked and if you are frustrated with Google not finding your blog, try this technique and see if it works for you.

[dburk]

Hi activetrader,

Much of what you have posted is useful, but I disagree with your characterization of this as having to do with the fabled "Google Sandbox". Your post perfectly describes the effect of Google's duplicate content filter.

When you post duplicate content, like PLR articles, Google's duplicate content filter will generally filter all except the originally indexed version. Your site was never penalized because there is no penalty for duplicate content, it is simply filtered out (moved to supplemental index). Any original content you post will not be filtered.

None of this has anything at all to do with the "Google Sandbox Effect" which simply ranks new pages lower because they have not been around long enough to have earned "trust".

Perhaps a better title for your post would be "How I avoided the duplicate content filter".

[activetrader]

There was original content as well but a lot of content was PLR and so original content was not indexed as well as PLR. The blog was not coming up in searches at all

[Joe118]

Something a lot of people are not taking into consideration is the so-called 'extraction target'. Google has a number of pages that it will crawl from your website, and no more. If it hits all the duplicate content PLR on your website and never hits the original content then none of the pages it crawled will show up in the index due to the duplicate content penalty.

You can easily control what google sees via your robots.txt. Just keep it away from your duplicate content PLR and guide it to your original content by allowing google to crawl that.

[cashcow]

Were you doing anything to promote the other pages on this blog before?

If not, perhaps it has nothing to do with duplicate content but is merely because you were not promoting it. Then when you made the post and got to work getting people to comment, submitting the RSS feed and bookmarking it you got traffic. But did that have anything to do with dupe content or merely lack of promotion to the other pages?

Actually, I wonder if you did the same thing with a dupe content page, would you have similar results?

[Steven Carl Kelly]

I have a site that is nothing but duplicate content, and it is indexed and ranked by Google.

[dburk]

Hi Franco,

The duplicate content filter does not prevent your pages from being indexed it simply puts the pages that it considers duplicate content into the supplemental index. So if you have little or no competition for a keyword phrase your PLR content will will still appear on SERP. Additionally at least one copy of the duplicate content always remains in the primary index.

As I said in my previous post there is no duplicate content penalty, but there is a duplicate content filter and there is plenty of evidence of that. Seeing your page listed is not evidence that the filter isn't working. If you start seeing dozens of duplicate pages in the top of the SERPs for competitive terms, then that would be evidence of no duplicate content filter, and a major problem for the Search Engines.

[Smokey_Joe]

There's no duplicate content penalty (across sites definitely), so this was probably just under-optimization.

BTW, the bulk of the traffic you got must have been sent to you by the bookmarking et al. sites, not by search engines. Is that right?

[dburk]

Hi Smokey_Joe,

You are spot on. There is no duplicate content penalty, duplicate content is filtered from the SERP but your site is not penalized.

P.S. Your User name makes me think about cookouts.