Is Your Website Invisible? The Google Sandbox Solution

What is the Google Sandbox?

It’s the mysterious, possibly non-existent web purgatory where millions of sites languish without rankings, visibility, or traffic.

How Do You Know if You’re Stuck in the Sandbox?

Here’s a rough set of criteria for you.

§ Your site is indexed and appears with the proper title, snippet, and url (www, or no www whichever you picked) – type site:www.yoursite.com into Google to check this.’
§ Your site has PageRank (use the google toolbar, or nichebot.com to find this)
§ It is regularly crawled, displaying cache dates not more than 10 days old
§ On your keyword, you rank in the top 20 for allinanchor, allintext, and allintitle. To check this, type, e.g. allinanchor: and see if you’re in the top 20.
§ You do not rank within the first 1000 places for the keyword the site was designed for

Does the Sandbox Really Exist, or is it Just the Google Algorithm?

This is a big controversy. Everyone has a different opinions.

Don’t listen to guys who handle bluechip companies - they optimize older, high PR sites. It’s 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 they're 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 Google’s 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 you’re 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 they’d 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 can’t 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.

It’s 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. What’s 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 don’t know exactly upon what and to what degree the filter depends, it’s 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 you’ll 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 you’re 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. Don’t 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, I’d suggest, if web building is what you do full time, that you begin a new site every month or two – eventually, if you’ve worked consistently on all of them, you’ll have one after another emerging from purgatory and flourishing in the rankings.

About the Author:
Brian Carter
Since 1999, San Diego SEO Consultant Brian B. Carter, MS, has reached more than 2 million readers online. Brian's 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
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