Is this a sandbox or a permanent penalty? Is there hope?

Seekness · 02-24-2011, 09:59 AM

Hey everyone,

I have a site (product reviews in a certain niche) with 250 unique pages of original articles that's about 4 months old now. It was getting up to 300 uniques per day from organic search and rising. For a backlinking strategy, I was using a combo of pretty heavy UAW and EZA submissions and had a decent amount of pages being linked to for their targeted keywords on a daily basis.

This morning I woke up to see that my traffic was really low and I knew something was up. The site just stopped getting google searches altogether.

When I do a site:domain.com search, my pages still show up in the results. My page will also show up if I search for a whole sentence from an article in quotes, etc. However, I ran some rank checks in Market Samurai for the keywords I was always ranking for, and all of the many pages that were ranking top 10 for their targeted keyword phrases are now gone.

Does this sound like a sandbox because of backlinks built at too fast a pace (or a penalty from using UAW links), even though the site is 4 months old? Or do you think I've been punished to the point of no return (short of requesting a reinstatement, which I'm reluctant to do and may not even be appropriate under these circumstances)?

Do you think there's any hope here? If you've dealt with a situation like this yourself in the past and actually brought the site back, I'd love to hear about it.

02-24-2011, 09:59 AM	#1
Seekness Rolling War Room Member Join Date: Jun 2009 Posts: 189 Thanks: 30 Thanked 16 Times in 13 Posts	Is this a sandbox or a permanent penalty? Is there hope? Hey everyone, I have a site (product reviews in a certain niche) with 250 unique pages of original articles that's about 4 months old now. It was getting up to 300 uniques per day from organic search and rising. For a backlinking strategy, I was using a combo of pretty heavy UAW and EZA submissions and had a decent amount of pages being linked to for their targeted keywords on a daily basis. This morning I woke up to see that my traffic was really low and I knew something was up. The site just stopped getting google searches altogether. When I do a site:domain.com search, my pages still show up in the results. My page will also show up if I search for a whole sentence from an article in quotes, etc. However, I ran some rank checks in Market Samurai for the keywords I was always ranking for, and all of the many pages that were ranking top 10 for their targeted keyword phrases are now gone. Does this sound like a sandbox because of backlinks built at too fast a pace (or a penalty from using UAW links), even though the site is 4 months old? Or do you think I've been punished to the point of no return (short of requesting a reinstatement, which I'm reluctant to do and may not even be appropriate under these circumstances)? Do you think there's any hope here? If you've dealt with a situation like this yourself in the past and actually brought the site back, I'd love to hear about it.