It really does boggle me. Yesterday, I noticed a sudden jump in the number of visitors I was receiving. I checked where they were actually going to. It turns out, over 50 people had just viewed my blog My top 5 website Layouts. I was shocked. How was there a sudden rise in the number of people reading my blog? I decided to investigate by first checking Google Search Engine Results.
Searching for “top website layouts” displayed my blog at about rank 2 in the UK and rank 6 on dot com.
You have NO idea how happy I was – it seemed all of my hard work was paying off.
I decided to leave it and come back later – just to see how many people would actually visit it. Around 6 hours later, it topped at about 350 and then began to slow down – I wondered why?
I checked the Google Search Engine Results again and to my surprise, not even on page 3! My blog post on dzone was there on page 2 but nothing about me. Why was this? From everything to nothing in about 5 hours? It slightly annoyed me but also put me in the mood to find out why – back to Google!
What I searched for…
“disappeared out of google search engine results”
and here’s what I found…
As we all know, Google crawls our websites and indexes the pages that we provide. We also know how big Google actually is and how many sites it has to index. This means that while Google crawls and indexes site, it cannot maintain a single index that is referenced when a user searches.
This explains why my site appeared for so long but then disappeared later. The server that was dealing with my requests may have had an “older” version of the index and therefore was not supplying me with the results I wanted.
I got this answer from a post found here: Google Answers.
is that it…?
Well we know that Google like to keep things under-wraps. This makes me think, are Google actually telling the truth? It makes perfect sense what is being said, but could it be wrong?
I decided to do a bit more searching and find out what other people thought.
I had read a post the other day regarding the so-called “Google Sandbox”. (The blog can be found here: Blog Business World)
I didn’t really know what was meant by the Sandbox effect (In general I do but not in Google Terms) so it was time to visit my good old friend Wikipedia.
The Sandbox Effect – Explains that the Sandbox is used for temporarily placing new domains at the top of the results page and to counter some techniques used by SEOs when promoting new sites;
…placing them into what is referred to as its “sandbox”, in an effort to counter the ways that search engine optimizers attempt to manipulate Google’s page ranking to bring sites to the top, by creating lots of inbound links to a new web site from other web sites that they own before creating that web site…
It seems that there are multiple answers out there for why Google may drop new sites in and out of the Search Engine Results. Personally, I hope it is the earlier of the two because I will hopefully be back to my previous position (plus or minus a few places depending on other indexed sites).
Has anyone else found the same problem? Let me know – It would be great to hear of other peoples experiences.
Jack
