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I recently updated my site, like 3-4 times in 2 months. At first everything was good, (i.e., Google was updating my pages' SERP content in 2-3 days). But now I did kind of a major change, I switched to CodeIgniter. My URLs are nearly the same as before, but my page titles and meta descriptions changed in terms of order. They were starting with brand name, and now they are starting with keywords. Now for one week Google has not updated my site.

Do you think my site is Sandboxed?

Is it bad to update too frequently?

Also, my site is hosted on a free host called 000Webhost, so it is sometimes down. Could that affect ranking very much? My site also has no backlinks whatsoever, so I don't think Google visits my site very often, and Google Webmaster Tools says so too.

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  • "URLs are nearly the same" - nearly? So, they are different? Have you redirected old to new? "page titles and meta descriptions changed in terms of order" - just the order in which they appear in the source of the page?
    – MrWhite
    Commented Sep 19, 2013 at 23:53
  • You are right, sorry I forgot to add that. The only change was when listing the projects, it was like ./gallery/project-name , then it is ./projects/project-name. Of course I 301-redirected. But the real problem is, even the homepage has not been updated in Google, for a week.
    – jeff
    Commented Sep 20, 2013 at 1:24
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    Just an FYI… I used 000WebHost in the past, and one day without warning they deleted my site completely - everything from database to files to DNS settings completely deleted. Make sure you have a good backup and consider moving to a better (paid) webhost
    – shea
    Commented Sep 25, 2013 at 22:53
  • @bungeshea you are right, of course I'm prepared for that. I want to make my home computer a server, but I cannot figure out the port-forwarding stuff with my router. As soon as I do that, I'm off 000webhost :)
    – jeff
    Commented Sep 26, 2013 at 9:36

4 Answers 4

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Also, my site is hosted on a free host called 000Webhost, so it is sometimes down. Could that affect ranking very much? ...I don't think Google visits my site very often, and Google Webmaster Tools says so too.

This is a pretty significant issue, which you indicated before here as well. If Google can't reach your site, it's not going to be able to index changes to it and might slow down crawling it. You really should consider moving your site to a more reliable web host.

Is it bad to update too frequently?

Generally, updating content frequently will result in your website getting crawled more frequently, so it's definitely not a bad thing to do.

My URLs are nearly the same as before...

If your URLs change, you'll need to 301 redirect them to ones with matching content, and get the new URLs indexed by submitting them in a sitemap.

My page titles and meta descriptions changed in terms of order. They were starting with brand name, and now they are starting with keywords.

That's not necessarily a bad thing either, providing that you're not repeating keywords (i.e., keyword stuffing).

My site also has no backlinks whatsoever

Obtaining some backlinks from authoritative relevant sites would certainly help, but the site needs to be reachable on a consistent basis too.

Do you think my site is Sandboxed?

It's likely not experiencing a Sandbox effect based on what you've described - it probably just hasn't been crawlable, relearned, and updated. I would suggest first fixing your web hosting, doing appropriate 301 redirection, resubmitting new URLs in your sitemap, and finally working on getting some quality backlinks.

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  • Thanks for your answer, dan! I did the necessary 301's, and updated the new sitemap. For the keyword stuffing part, I'm not sure but I think they are ok. I mean they are not the form "keyword1, keyword2, keyword3" , but in a meaningful way, like "you can see our keyword1 and keyword2 in this keyword3 project" etc. for the backlinks part, I have no idea how to get them. A lot of site-directory sites already give me backlinks, but I don't think they count. Should I go to forums and write backlinks myself? Or social media ?
    – jeff
    Commented Sep 20, 2013 at 1:46
  • No problem, hope it helps get your site back on track. The keywords are probably fine. I would find sites that are relevant to yours, and ranking fairly well, and try to get them to mention and link to yours and vice versa. Social media might provide more signals and help bring people to your site too. Have a look at some of the Questions here under Frequent, like this one. Good luck!
    – dan ♦
    Commented Sep 20, 2013 at 1:55
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Updating very frequently is always a good thing and your site get crawled frequently but updation should be done in content not with URL and title. If title is not working for your site then you can change it but not to frequently.

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  • I guess so. Did anybody have an experience with changing the title? Does it hurt? Most importantly, in long-run? What I did is actually changing the title from "company name - city name" to "city name - industry name - company name" .
    – jeff
    Commented Sep 20, 2013 at 10:02
  • Changing title or description is required when that particular page is not getting rank for target keyword then changing their title wont effect you it can reflect some good result but when you change the title of ranking page and its cached also then that page can pushed down. So change the title of those pages which are not ranking.
    – Justice Brand
    Commented Sep 27, 2013 at 7:20
  • I changed the homepage's title a lot, but now I'm steady and I think it worked out for me. Thanks for all the help !
    – jeff
    Commented Sep 27, 2013 at 14:31
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No, Updating website too frequently will not hurt your SEO.

Keyword in title is not more meaningful. As title is second most important on–page SEO element. I will suggest you to read below guideline for creating unique title.

http://moz.com/learn/seo/title-tag

According to Webmaster Guidelines, crawling & indexing of the page is depends on If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.

Is it bad to update too frequently?

No, There are lots of website on the internet, which are getting updates in time seconds like amazon.com.

Updating a website can be a good thing for you, If you follow basic rules of Webmaster guidelines. Google always like New and fresh updates of the website.

If your website will down when Google is going to crawl, then Google is re-scheduling the Crawl of the Website after 24 hours. If the downtime is more than 24 hours or repeating more time then It will definitely hurt your Website SERP.

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Updating pages can be a problem or a solution.

Small changes are usually not a problem, but think about this: if you change a page that displays content about "football" and now displays content about "monkeys", as an example, of course rankings are gonna drop, you're completely changing the subject of a page.

If that's not the case, and you're simply updating pages with different but related content, make sure you're doing it for the better. Better content, better structured urls etc.

Also, if urls are gonna change, make sure you properly forward them with 301 redirects.

Your hosting being down is not gonna be helpful. But it also depends on how often. Many companies offer about 99% up time, so right there you do know it is not always up. But down time is definitely gonna hurt you.

What else you can do:

Make sure google sees the changes in your pages. For this,

1 - On Webmaster Tools, Go to "Health" / "Fetch as Google" where you can enter the address of the page that has changed, click on "Fetch" then click on "Submit to index". At which point a message will pop up and say: "Select if your page is new or has been recently updated. Google doesn't guarantee to index all submitted URLs." Choose your option, and hit OK.

2 - Resubmit sitemap.

3 - Adjust crawl frequency.

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  • Content is 99.9% the same, but the meta descriptions and titles were written poorly, now they are more "stuffed" (in a good way :) ) with keywords. So it might be the case that the subject is slightly changed in the eyes of Google
    – jeff
    Commented Sep 20, 2013 at 1:25
  • If you changed it for the better, better things will come. Content being the same, with minor changes also helps. Of course I gave an extreme example, but you get the idea.
    – riseagainst
    Commented Sep 20, 2013 at 11:14
  • I hope. I'm still waiting, nothing changed in Google. Bing has updatedd it though.
    – jeff
    Commented Sep 20, 2013 at 15:29
  • Don't get to caught up in it. As long as you know you did the right things, have a little patience and things should work out. I'll update my answer with a couple of extra things.
    – riseagainst
    Commented Sep 20, 2013 at 16:04
  • Thanks for your help guisasso! I do the fetching and sitemap submission. But how do I change the crawl frequency ? edit: Oh I saw it.
    – jeff
    Commented Sep 20, 2013 at 18:57

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