What is the Google Sandbox
Its the mysterious, possibly non-existent web purgatory where millions of sites languish without rankings, visibility, or traffic.
How Do You Know if Youre Stuck in the Sandbox
Heres a rough set of criteria for you.
Does the Sandbox Really Exist, or is it Just the Google Algorithm
This is a big controversy. Everyone has a different opinions.
Dont listen to guys who handle bluechip companies - they optimize older, high PR sites. Its your everyday mainly-new-sites webmaster who knows this problem intimately. In fact, all the big sites need to do is place the keyword in the title and theyre on the first page. This gives them an unfair advantage not unlike what the media elite has enjoyed for decades.
Regardless of whether the sandbox is a separate phenomenon from the algorithm, the degree of prejudice against new sites has hurt quality of Googles search results. This is especially true with products and topics both new and urgent. The bigger sites may not be covering it, but searchers end up there without high quality answers.
The common wisdom now is that if youre looking for new websites, go to MSN or Yahoo instead. Neither of these sites is using this kind of filter. Many websites rank in the top 10 (for their targeted keywords) on these two search engines, yet are nowhere to be found in Google.
Why Would Google Do This
Google frowns upon SEOs who try to overly influence ranking, so they needed to find a way around SEO factors to deliver quality results. So theyd look for signs of SEO in websites, e.g. how consistent the addition of backlinks is, and how repetitive (vs. natural) the anchor text of backlinks is, and they consider the age of the site and its backlinks.
Redesign Penalties
Similarly, websites that have made the mistake of too comprehensively redesigning their look, content, or navigation have been shocked to find that they get penalized for this updating. Google seems to prefer a frozen in time or moving like molasses kind of internet. But to be fair, this is something that had to be included to beat spammers who were buying old websites and refueling them with keyword spam.
Why Do You Get Sandboxed
Some sites have gotten out of the sandbox in a week, while others can take up to a year or more. No one knows if any one contributing factor gets you out sooner rather than later. Some point to the age of inbound links, or the frequency with which your site acquires them. Some say that getting too many inbound links too quickly appears artificial, and is flagged as spam. But others argue that Google cant know how fast a site should acquire links. A website that received national news coverage, for example, could acquire hundreds or thousands of links in a day.
Its likely that no one outside of Google fully understands how the sandbox works. The problem has been noticed and discussed for nearly 2 years, and no one has given a satisfactory answer. Whats crystal clear is that Google has made it so complex that it cannot be reverse engineered.
How Long Will You Be Making Sand Castles
The delay seems to vary anywhere from four to 11 months. Since we dont know exactly upon what and to what degree the filter depends, its likely a different magic combination for every site- and this fits with webmasters experience. So keep your head down, develop content, get inbound links, and eventually youll get out.
Some suggest that when you come out of the sandbox, you are not fully free. They notice a rationing or gradual increase in traffic from Google. In the meantime, older sites may rank better than you, regardless of the quality of their look, feel, and content. Deal with it. Keep your head down and keep working.
Another wrinkle: some webmasters suggest that sandboxing can occur at the page level, not simply at the site level, and that it is the bigger money/traffic keywords that get sandboxed. Again, this could simply be due to the level of competition on that keyword, as the entire site is not sandboxed if youre getting rankings and traffic from other keywords.
Is There a Way to Trick the Sandbox Filter
Some webmasters have talked about finding cracks in the algorithm and they mainly involve backlinks. For a while, there was a lot of linkspam on blogs, but everyone Google, bloggers, and blog providers have cracked down on that exploit.
The real sandbox solution is not a trick - unless you define everything done by the SEO-aware as tricky. The answer is to grow your content and backlinks naturally over time. Dont look for the quick buck, the quick ranking, or the easy way out. Go back to basics and build websites that people can use and enjoy. Exchange links with quality websites.
To avoid frustration, Id suggest, if web building is what you do full time, that you begin a new site every month or two eventually, if youve worked consistently on all of them, youll have one after another emerging from purgatory and flourishing in the rankings.
Since 1999, , has reached more than 2 million readers online. His most popular site ranks in the top 1% of all major websites. Brians second book, How I Made $78,024.44 in Six Months Using the Newest Secrets of AdSense and Overlooked Keywords will be available in October, 2005 from his website, Ranking High on Search Engines
Many people will refuse to give a reciprocal link to any web site that isnt directly related to theirs. This is largely based on a misconception about the relative value of links. There are several problems with the theory, and you need to think about them before deciding whether to refuse all links.
First, many pages organize their links into a directory. Even if you accept that relevant links are the only ones worth having, a site that is wholly unrelated to yours can manufacture relevance by putting your link on a page with a bunch of similar pages. If all of the links contain a description, they will make the page contain content that is similar to yours.
Second, relevance is mainly a theory about where the search engines will go in the future. Right now, all links have some value. Regardless of what search engines will do in five years, it cant hurt you to have links that arent relevant to your page. If the algorithm changes, you can simply remove the reciprocal links to all non-relevant pages.
Third, anyone who does a cursory review of which web sites are at the top of the results will see that many have arrived there simply by linking to anyone and everyone. The search engines use different algorithms, and you can clearly get benefits from good anchor text and description even on sites that have nothing to do with yours. Just avoid reciprocal linking with so-called bad neighborhoods such as gambling, adult, and drug sites.
Teve Torbes is an expert owner of a site, who knows a whole lot about . He has also created a valuable site.