On Church Web Master we are writing a series of articles about the church directories we are creating to help churches all over the country get noticed on the Internet.  We are going to follow four of the sites to see how they are doing on the search engines.  As a church webmaster you will be able to find some tricks to help get your own sites to show up well on Google, MSN, and Yahoo.

Today, we are going to talk about the Fresno California Churches site.  The Fresno California Churches had been showing up as a page 1 result on a Google search for keyword searches of “Fresno California Churches”, “churches in Fresno”, and “Fresno churches”.  Then, the site quit showing up.  The site is no longer showing up as the result of any of the typical keyword searches that had been so successful for the previous month.  What happened?

It is something that happens to most new sites.  It is a phenomenon that is commonly referred to as being sand boxed (new sites are not allowed to play with more established sites).  While Google denies the existence of a sand box, it happens so frequently that it is hard to beleive that it doesn’t exist.  If your site is sand boxed, don’t panic.  It will eventually come back to the search engines.  It may take months, or it may take weeks, but it will come back.  I have had this happen on 2/3 of my sites.

What do you do while your site is sand boxed?  Keep writing articles.  Work on adding bells and whistles in anticipation of the site showing up again on the search engines and then getting an increase in traffic.  We will have to wait to talk about Fresno California Churches until it comes out of the sand box.  In our next article we will check on the Cape Coral Florida Churches site.