Q and A: Are we in the Google Sandbox?

Dear Kalena...

Having spent some time in an effort to get our site a good listing on Google I have now given up and started using Adwords. I am hoping that this is a short term thing and that in the long term I can improve our listings to the extent where I don't have to pay to be in the running with Google.

For some time I have suspected that there is something fundamentally wrong with the construction of the site. In the past we have spent many hundreds of pounds to a company that promised to get us a top 5 listing on Google (yes, I now know this cannot be promised by anyone!).

Today for the first time I learnt (from your site) about the Sandbox. Are we in the Sandbox?? Kalena I am a lost soul and need some help from a higher power! (That's you!)

Could you give me any guidance please? BTW I am aware we need to do some work on the site as the time users spend on the index page is very short, but I am juggling lots of missions!

Thanks Kalena, the site is fab and I learn day by day.

Best regards
Adrian

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Adrian

Regardless of whether your site is in the Sandbox, there is one big glaring problem that I can see on your site immediately. You use a META refresh to redirect all visitors from http://www.macoles.com/ to http://www.macoles.com/html/. What is the point of that?

META refreshes can be viewed as suspicious by search engines, because some spammers use them to pull the old "bait and switch" tactic. That is, advertise a certain type of content in the search engine listings but then redirect visitors to an entirely different site e.g. porn, gambling etc. I've also heard that META refreshes can cause problems for search bots trying to index your site. Some bots coming across refresh code will simply leave the site without indexing it.

According to this site, you should never use a META refresh on a page that you want indexed by search engines. It also states that Googlebot has trouble with pages that use a refresh time-out of "0" like yours does.

However having checked your site, I can see that:

1) Googlebot last cached it on November 16.
2) You have a Google Toolbar PageRank of 4/10 and 5 backward links.
3) Google has indexed 69 pages from your site.

So although Google may not currently have trouble with your META refresh, other engines might so I would trash it as soon as possible.

Regarding whether your site is in the Google Sandbox, I don't think it is. Why? Because a few searches for logical keyword phrases such as "self catering holidays Jersey" pulls up your site within the top 10. Sure your site doesn't rank highly for more competitive terms like "holiday cottages Jersey", but your poor link popularity probably has more to do with that. If your site was sandboxed, I wouldn't expect it to rank well for any of your target phrases.

So Adrian, if you want to boost your search engine rankings, get rid of that horrible META refresh, get to work increasing the links pointing to your site from related high quality sites and keep adding fresh content.