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July 19, 2005

New Example of the Sandbox

Randfish over at SEO Chat posted a thread named SEOmoz.org - In Google's Sandbox - Hilarity Ensues! In that thread he describes how his SEOmoz.org blog has been sandboxed after moving it from socengine.com/seo to seomoz.org.

Randfish describes that for searches he used to rank well for, he no longer ranks for. He gives many examples in the thread and describes that he has never done any "unnatural" link building for this site.

I applaud Randish for giving this a go. He said towards the end of the thread, "I'm just glad I was able to do this with a site that doesn't need SE traffic..." This is in response to Ben's advice for most people, that he "rarely if ever advise anyone to mess around with already well ranked pages unless they have too."

One thing is not clear from the thread is when this all occurred. I'll assume he didn't move over the domain name within a week or so. :)



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posted rustybrick in Google Optimization at July 19, 2005 8:33 AM Comments (4)

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Comments

Barry, see my comments on this at SEO Chat. When I try to fetch those URLs with WebBug, I get a 404 error, not a 301 redirect. Looks like Rand shot himself in the foot, yes, but not by redirecting.

 

Posted by Dan Thies at July 19, 2005 15:35

Ouch!

 

Posted by Barry Schwartz at July 19, 2005 16:42

Thanks for the link Barry. The 301 re-directs work fine as long as you're not using old http 1.0 or 0.9 (I don't know of any systems that do). Thanks for pointing that out, though.

 

Posted by randfish at July 19, 2005 19:10

> I don't know of any systems that do

Many spiders still use (for a good reason) HTTP 1.0. From any web server log:

"GET /pagename.html HTTP/1.0" 200 10000 "-" "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

"GET /pagename.html HTTP/1.0" 200 10000 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)"

"GET /pagename.html HTTP/1.0" 200 10000 "-" "msnbot/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"

Notice the "HTTP/1.0".

 

Posted by Low Level at July 19, 2005 21:22

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