Originally Posted by D-A-L

Just out of interest Biggles and Hubuk, how are your sites fairing now a few months on?

The site www.hub-uk.com is back where it was for most of the search terms. I have noticed that it is taking me longer since the beginning of August to get a new page listed which probably has something to do with the changes Google made. I still get a new page title to the top or near within two to three weeks (it was three to four days).

The site www.cookingholidays.co.uk still does not appear in the top five pages of results (don't bother to check further back) but it will not be six months old until some time in November. This does suggest that the theory about the Google sandbox has some foundation. The site has a lot of content now (the pages are again duplicated on Hub-UK without any adverse effect) and I do expect at some stage that it will get ranked.

If I never said it before, thank your for your help and advice at the time.

No problem, good to hear that the site is still performing and interesting to look at different cases where this happens.

I'm still sandboxed. Today is 5/10/05 and it happened 25/5/05 so thats nearly 5 months.

Something strange has happened though in that not every page is sandboxed. I noticed a week ago that all my German language pages are back to normal and many galleries are no1 when searching in google.de . Also a handfull of English galleries are alos no1, Shrewesbury, Ossett Stockport and Halifax (UK search only due to another Halifax) when searching for "aerial photographs of" and town name.

There is no difference beteween these no1 sites and the other sites which are anywhere from 50 to 450. I have been racking my brains and looking for differnces but non can be found.

Other sites remain buried even though they are often the only website devoted to this subject, EG "aerial photographs of Preston", or Stafford, or leeds and the big cities such as Manchester and Liverpool are even worse.

Another strange thing is that I mentioned Stockport is not snadboxed.. well sometimes I search and its no1 and sometimes its around 250 and it keeps swapping between the two, even changing places in the same hour..... Its a though googles sandbox filter has an error ( I have pleasing mental visions of Google operators in front of their sandbox program reading windows has performed a fatal exception at Kernal 82173216 lol )

Thanks and regards,

Jonathan Webb

www.webbaviation.co.uk

Heaven help us! Google has started again with a new update called "Jagger" . . . are they really taking the Mick this time.

I have noticed a 50% drop off in page views with my Google AdSense account. I still have a lot of search terms in place so I don't know where it is affecting me.

It will be six months in November since I launched the Cooking Holidays web site and it still does not show up in the top results of Google even though it is one of the most focused and most informative within its category. It is high with Yahoo and MSN. This would support the sandbagging theory.

Anyone else heard anyhting about Jagger?

"most focused and most informative " ..... ahh well your stuffed then.... they will expect you to pay for advertising.

Try writting pages with no original content whatsoever just a bunch of links and adverts.... thats what seems to do well in Google now.

Arn't there laws to stop companies from gaining 90% market shares and then using it for an extorsion racket?

I wish Google and all their employees would go for a long walk on a short pier.

Ahh yes, Jagger is causing similar hype now to what we experienced during the "Florida" update. I noticed a huge hit back in September and many people are only seeing the effects of the update now. If your seeing negative effects then as always, like i said before (Hubuk!) sit tight....checkout - http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/more-weather-reporting/ theres more to come yet, we are still very much in the update and you really need to hold off judgement until a couple of weeks.

There are some positive changes on my website, most of the small towns such as http://www.webbaviation.co.uk/buxton/buxton.htm have suddenly moved back to no 1 for a UK search.

All the cities are still hidden plus some of the larger towns.

I have a theory !!!!

Google says its targeting those horrible contentless directories, and what does a directory look like to a stupid computer?.... a lot of links, adverts and not much text....... and what does an HTML photo gallery look like... well a lot of links, adverts and not much text.

For now I'm experimenting on a few pages with removing all unecessary links and Amazon adverts on key pages and for the cities I'm removing the Google adds too. The Buxton page above was hidden then a week after changing the links it was suddenly no1. However at the same time a lot of unchanged pages also moved to no1 so I can't say thats it.

I've started using conventional php database galleries.... I've no idea how Google will look at these so I will probably do a short version in HTML with lots of words and not many links then a link through to a php gallery. Thats what I've done with Buxton.

My pages have huge amounts of text so it is not that which is necessarily affecting anything. Having said that I would alwasys have two or three paragraphs of text to help get the page found.

I recently did a page which contains over 70 images to tell about a cooking holiday I did in Tuscany. If you look at the page you will see the page is broken up with small bits of text which at least gives the search engines something to find. I have also called all the pictures "tuscany-whatever" in the hope that Google image searches will pick them up.

What annoys me about all this (on the assumption that it will all sort itself out in a few weeks) is why me again and why (for one search) does a site last cached by Google on 30th August come top of the results. It always seems when they do these "tweeks" that the crap floats to the surface.

Incidentally my Cooking Holidays site (which appears at the top of MSN and Yahoo search results) has not started appearing in the top pages of Google results (I have not seen it anywhere else either). It will be six months old in November so will it appear then?

My stats for this week show the same drop as they did in June - 33%. It does nothing when you are trying to sell your services . . . and it has not even been six months since the last fiasco.

I wish Google wasn't so dominant but then what goes round comes round. What happened to Alta Vista?

The new website sandbox seems to last 6 to 12 months. I'm not sure exactly how long but non of my new websites score well. In June when the problem first started I opened manpic ground and aerial photos of Manchester and aeroengland aerial photography but both of these are still burried in the search results. When I first launched them I had a friend put a link on her website so that googlebot would spider them which it duley did so I know that they are indexed, indeed when you do an abstract search of a big chunk of text in inverted commas they do show up. I havn't put a lot of work into link building swapping with these two, I will wait until I can see some return on the time investment.

The image naming is good, dont forget matching alt texts as well. Image search has allways taken a long time to index stuff, they seem to like images that have been there at least 6 months whereas when I was no1 I could add a page and have the new page come straight in at no1 in google text search in 10 days.

Yep the heart of the problem is Google in the UK is a monopoly with something like 90% of the market so they can blunder around to their hearts content completly obliviouse to the trail of destroyed businesses they leave in their wake. I though we had laws against monopolies.

6 months or even 12 in the sandbox is quite normal. I have two sites which are still in now after 18months although one looks as though it is emerging with some keywords fluctuating. It really does look as though Google are now trying to get to the stage where they no longer have these huge updates once in a while which throw everything up in the air and instead will be looking to have an index which evolves daily.

I have also in the past had a few strong words to say about Google but to be honest now I just accept these changes. I have personally lost a lot of money from various updates they have made but then everyone is all to quick to forget the good times and those days google sent you all your visitors and income. I think what they are building and sharing with webmasters is fantastic, I mean if you said to people 5 or 10 years ago they could make what some people earn a year in a full time job running a website with some ads, they would bite your hand off.

Google has made many millionaires of webmasters and given many people the opportunity to take their hobbies to the next level, Whilst I understand peoples frustrations I personally wouldn't be so quick to shoot them down.

Jagger still has maybe two weeks left to run, it will be interesting to see how things roll out the back of it.