Google sandbox or ban?
After checking out and registering at PayPerPost.com, a site/service that lets you post topics and get paid for it, I received an email back from them stating I was not eligible because my site is not indexed yet by Google.
What?
My site isn’t indexed by Google. A lo and behold, it really isn’t. So I decided to do some investigating. My biggest fear was offcourse a ban. It wouldn’t be the first time someones site get kicked of Google for now reason. But why would I get banned? The site runs with a default Wordpress installation, I only edited some php files for the Snap function and MyBlogLog. So that can’t be it right?
But after some searching on Google itself I came upon the sandbox theory. Sure, that could be it, the site is not that old yet (4/21/07). I don’t have many inboud links at the moment, so I’m not getting much love for Google.
But you do come across some interesting stuff on a search.
First up is an interesting article on why your site could have disappeared on Google. Note that all the things listed in the article are things I checked on this site.
Also interesting is this online tool to check you webranking.
And lastly, a cool site with an online function to create an XML sitemap, usefull for your Google webmaster account.
So I have created the robots.txt file, tweaked my .htaccess file, made some changes in the meta, browsed in my Google-account and learned a lot from the webmaster info section.
I’m used to work as a usability freak, learning all this about SEO is a nice change.