For the first time in the three years I’ve been making websites, I’ve finally had one enter the Google Sandbox. College Fight Song Ringtones was completely removed from all Google rankings. The site is still indexed in Google (seen here), but it just lost all the rankings.

This website was bringing in about 60 uniques a day and making ringtone leads every now and then. It wasn’t a big earner, but I expected it to be one come football season. I was getting uniques and ranked on page 1 for all types of keywords like “tar heel ringtones, hokie ringtones, wisconsin ringtones, memphis tigers ringtones” and so many more. Now they are all gone.

Do I not have to worst luck or what? I’m starting to think my server is cursed. It’s been 6 months since my two biggest sites got penalized by Google and I lost thousands of rankings and unique visitors. And now I have one of my up and coming sites get Sandboxed! Nobody I’ve talked to has had this type of luck.

I built Fight Music Ringtones from the ground up using Wordpress. It has only a handful of links back to it, like from this blog or some other sports sites I own. I didn’t do anything spammy with it. It’s not a dropped domain that I picked up. I followed all the rules, and yet it ended up in the sandbox. The site got 1 unique yesterday … and that was me. It has completely disappeared and there is no telling when it will come back. Could be a week… or I’ve read some people say a year.