There are a couple of ways Google can ruin your visitor numbers and potentially ruin your business. These are a new algorithm and the sandbox effect, either can completely remove your links but is unlikely to do this and may just negatively effect your rankings. With an algorithm change the way Google ranks all sites changes and some websites will be better off and some worse off. With the sandbox effect Google changes how it ranks your site specifically and has basically decided to penalize you by ranking your results lower than they would be under their normal algorithm. The reason Google do this is usually that they have identified your site as spam or overusing SEO techniques. Poor SEO usually causes the sandbox effect, often it is very obvious Search Engine Optimisation, do it yourself SEO is especially common as a cause of the sandbox effect. Many people understand the basics of SEO, do it yourself website owners though often don’t understand the details: for example an SEO do it yourself fan may understand about using keywords, they may though put these words in too many times and in short articles: they may also not put keywords into full sentences and only use very obvious and competitive keywords for SEO. Do it yourself website owners often guess at which are the best keywords and end up with keywords that many people optimize for: too many of these type of keywords and the sandbox effect may well penalize you. Although the Sandbox effect is not completely understood outside of Google focusing just on very popular words is almost guaranteed to convince Google you are a spam site. So if you are going to do your own SEO to get out of the sandbox effect think very carefully about your keywords. Don’t have long lists of keywords on your page either and try to get keywords into articles at a maximum of 3% but usually more like 1%. If there are very popular keywords you want to use then put them each on different pages and so each page only has one very popular keyword: don’t repeat the same keywords on every page as Google will not believe that this is a coincidence.
As well as the keywords on pages consider the inbound links you have from elsewhere: they shouldn’t all have the same very popular keywords in the anchor text or Google will assume that you have built these links yourself with the keywords in rather than them being people genuinely linking to you. Hopefully you still have logins to go back to change the anchor text on these links: otherwise you may want to do a new link building campaign with more of a variety of keywords. There are a couple of new changes to Google as well that may help you out of the Google Sandbox if you really are an Search Engine Optimization do it yourself enthusiast. One is that Google now consider how long people stay on a page before coming back to Google: write interesting articles to keep people there to improve rankings and Google’s trust in you. Also Google now use Google + 1 that is going to be an important ranking factor in future as Google see it as being more difficult to manipulate than inbound links.
Contact Affordable SEO Company if you have any suspicion your website has experienced Google sandbox effect.
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