jwm

have a site of mine which is around 2 years old, around 6 months into its life it was ranking on page 2 in google for its main term when I changed the meta titles. The site immediately disappeared from the top 1,000 results

I googled around to see what had happened and found a bunch of stuff which said google doesn't like changes to meta title and usually hits you with a sandbox penalty for a bunch of time.

I decided to leave the new meta titles as I felt over the long term the new meta one would be more beneficial. In the meantime I just kept adding links to the site waiting on the penalty ending. Thing is its 18 months now and the site is still nowhere in google despite being number 1 in bing and 2 in yahoo.

Anybody any ideas how I can get some google love back (other than change the meta titles back to what they were 18 months ago)

apexSEORM

no. You can change your title tag whenever you damned well please. Your problem lies elsewhere I promise you. I would love to see where you found this info though so I can fucking stab them in they eye for confusing n00bs.

Hav3n

change our meta titles all the time and never run into a 'sandbox'


My guess is that your meta titles suck (according to google) and that you should change them back.

Or that you've done something else that got you hit with a penalty.
Or you screwed something else up like robots.txt or noindex or something.

jwm

Thanks apexSEORM

Thanks Hav3n, given what you and apex have both said the penalty is obviously for something else.

Fyi the change to the tiles wasn't major from - as an example - jackets.org to Jackets | Mens Jackets | Ladies Jackets (note thats not the domain)