Google Sandbox - All Latest Data
What is the Google "sandbox"?
In my own words I would say it is an observation of an algo effect implemented by Google in March 2004 that makes new sites not rank at all for a period of many months. It is a dampening effect that was most probably created to stop spam sites from getting high rankings quickly in the SERPs.
Here is a 11 page thread at WMW started Nov 17, 2005 discussing the sandbox.
Here is an article from Search Engine Roundtable (Barry Schwartz) from May 20, 2005 entitled Google Sandbox Defined.
Here is an article about it written May 6, 2004 - only a few months after the effect was observed.
How do I determine if my site is sandboxed?
In this excellent post from randfish at SEOMoz dated Jan 11, 2006 he explains various techniques on how to detect and determine if you are in the box.
How do I get out of the sandbox faster?
On the January 3, 2006 a special thread was created in which the moderators at SE Roundtable Forums discussed different strategies on this.
They came up with 3 different solutions:
- Barry posted:
Well, most experts believe that the sandbox is about earning Google's trust. How can we earn Google's trust?
- trusted links from trusted sites - quality content - use an old domain name that has been live (purchase a site)
- Use the DaveN redirect method that DaveN posted at SEW Forums on the December 12, 2005. This method is using an old out-of-sandbox domain to put the site on and then 301 redirect it to trick Google into belieaving the site is much older than what it is.
- Randfish posted:
produce a piece of content that's going to skyrocket your site to Internet superstardom - del.icio.us/popular, digg, furl, mentioned on huge blog sites, slashdot, etc.
It is also interesting to see what Mike Grehan is saying about this matter. Here is his ClickZ column and here his blog post. Basically his answer is to start a buzz marketing and other SEM strategies and don't bury yourself under SEO tech. For him the answer seem to be marketing and not SEO. Here is Randfish reply to that article.
On a follow-up post by dazzlindonna on SEO Scoop it is interesting to see that her preferred choice is to target all those non-sandboxed keyword terms and build up the site until until it gets realesed from the box.
Here are also a few theories posted at SEOFAQ.net
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Jim Westergren is a Swedish web entrepreneur currently living in Spain. He is happily married and has three lovely children. Some of his interests are web development, SEO and writing.He is the Founder of DomainStats and N.nu. Read his full about page.