See where your sandboxed site would rank!

skattabrain

Jan 23rd 2005, 8:10 am

this is interesting, if this is true, then 1 of my sites is definetly "STILL" sandboxed baecuase i get a rank of #3 using this but i'm not in the first 10 pages normally.

but why? the site was launched in September!

Bernard

Jan 23rd 2005, 8:16 am

But it seems as though there must be at least 13 of them for the filter to be turned off.

Curious since Google supposedly ignores all words after the first 10. Did something change?

....

Sure enough, Google does not appear to be truncating search queries anymore!

T0PS3O

Jan 23rd 2005, 8:17 am

What happens if your site has 'asdf' as text on it?

skattabrain

Jan 23rd 2005, 8:18 am

this is interesting... the more i search, the more i realize that my other sites do better as well... i have sites on page #1, link #5 that come up as #1 with this trick.

this begs the question ... how do you get out?!

skattabrain

Jan 23rd 2005, 8:18 am

i would like to see everyone inthe co-op try this trick and report their results

leeds1

Jan 23rd 2005, 8:22 am

mine are all #1 (except for my banned/ dup content/ 302 whatever it is site)

ferret77

Jan 23rd 2005, 8:25 am

all my new sites have great rankings with the nonesense words

I would like to see google out of business asap, or at least reduced to say 30% of searches

ResaleBroker

Jan 23rd 2005, 8:25 am

With this my missing pages are back and most are in the #1 position.

crazyhorse

Jan 23rd 2005, 8:26 am

Well dont know what it is but im sure if i pass this filter i will do good big time. Number one for most keywords...;)

mykel79

Jan 23rd 2005, 8:29 am

Yup, the limit's higher, now 32 words. Now that's interesting. Makes it easier to search for content thieves.

As for the -asdf, I agree it's interesting to see the different results. I'm not quite sure they actually remove the sandbox, though. There was talk of -asdf after a big google update about a year ago, they returned drastically different results back then also.

longcall911

Jan 23rd 2005, 8:32 am

Sure enough, #1 with the filter killer. I was certain that I am being penalized, but could not prove it. Now I know. I just don't know why.

Great post. Many, many thanks.

wrkalot

Jan 23rd 2005, 8:52 am

This doesn't seem to be a "site wide" filter to me. Some of my kewords/phrases are effected, some are not.

ResaleBroker

Jan 23rd 2005, 9:01 am

This doesn't seem to be a "site wide" filter to me. Some of my kewords/phrases are effected, some are not.That most likely means only some of your pages are "sandboxed" or they don't rank well.

dazzlindonna

Jan 23rd 2005, 9:01 am

Is it possible wrkalot, that some of those phrase wouldn't rank well - sandbox or no sandbox? Obviously, we can't all rank well for everything, so we tend to concentrate on a few. It's those few - the ones we truly believe should rank well - that should be looked at with this filter-breaker.

skattabrain

Jan 23rd 2005, 9:04 am

This doesn't seem to be a "site wide" filter to me. Some of my kewords/phrases are effected, some are not.
you probably have to factor in the competition.

not sure about you guys... buy i got some work to do!

wrkalot

Jan 23rd 2005, 9:33 am

This is a phrase I have been targeting for a very loooong time. It's not competitive. I held the number one and two spots up until "florida". Donna (or any of you guys) care to take a peak at my site and phrase for a quick looksee? I'll PM the info to you.

Christopher

Jan 23rd 2005, 9:34 am

Not only does this bring my sandboxed site from 1000+ to the first page, it also raises the position of my seven year old never-been-sandboxed site.

And the guy that has a strong number one position drops about 5 positions, with various sites in the 'real' serp 2 through 10 moving above him.

Interesting, but how to use this info?

dazzlindonna

Jan 23rd 2005, 9:36 am

Feel free to PM me, wrkalot. (No guarantees I'll have a clue though). :)

Interesting, but how to use this info?

Well, it can't be used unless we can figure out what is being filtered. It may just be "age", but it may be something else entirely.

SEbasic

Jan 23rd 2005, 9:39 am

This trick used to work months ago...

It's a search that bypases the Hilltop Algo (basically)...

I wonder how long ago this started to work again...

For More info, read this article (http://www.seorank.com/analysis-of-hilltop-algorithm.htm)...

Smyrl

Jan 23rd 2005, 9:43 am

If the sandbox involves an age factor, how old are some of the older sites in the sandbox.

I have a site whose domain name was purchased June 2003. Wayback Machine shows pages for it in November and December of 2003 but version is nothing like what is currently online. I put up site and did not like design so did not link. It was around March of '04 before I started tracking any keywords from site so site is around 9 months old. Trick with "-asdf" shows different results than normal search.

Incidentally, it appears results I am seeing (with supposed filters) turned off approximates what I saw about a couple of weekends ago when about 6 data centers showed promising results.

Shannon

-----------

Post below by SEbasic attributes difference in results to Hilltop. This well may be. I have never been a big advocate of sandbox theory and had not felt this site was sandboxed but for whatever reason it does better on keyword searches using "-asdf trick".

Old Welsh Guy

Jan 23rd 2005, 9:46 am

Sites don't get sandboxed, it is links that get sandboxed, and mor over link benefit to a site. Because of this it is a search query filter, not a site filter. It is perfectly possible to rank #1 for one phrase, while being sandboxed on another.

crazyhorse

Jan 23rd 2005, 9:59 am

So its a matter of time... before you eventually will rank better because of the search query filter . How long can that be..months weeks before the filter is deleted ....if it is a filter.

SEbasic

Jan 23rd 2005, 10:00 am

I highly suggest that you guys read this (http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~georgem/hilltop/).

It will tell you exactly what adding those terms to your query is doing...

skattabrain

Jan 23rd 2005, 10:13 am

it's probably not so much an A or B switch ... it's probably a ranking system just like the serps... just in the other direction.

i noticed the same, some sites make quantum leaps, other sites already doing well on page 1 climb to 1 or closer to one.

ferret77

Jan 23rd 2005, 10:16 am

SEbasic you arn't making any sense

if the filter bypasses the mythical hilltop algo

then wouldn't all the results be different, not just a handful

the filter doesn nothing to my old sites

ResaleBroker

Jan 23rd 2005, 10:19 am

Sites don't get sandboxed, it is links that get sandboxed, and mor over link benefit to a site.I agree that sites don't get sandboxed but "Age of Page" might be a factor.

I recently ran a test on a domain registered in 1997. By way of the ad network four-thousand (4000) links were pointed to the home page. Result: Top ten placement on Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

At the same time I created a "New" page on the same domain and via ad network three-hundred links were pointed to the page. Result: Sandboxed

I'm not drawing any hard and fast conclusions based on those results but it does make me wonder.

SEbasic

Jan 23rd 2005, 10:22 am

I don't know what sites you are running, or how competitive the results are, but I can assure you that everything in that article is relevant to using this query.

I even read a paper a while ago that talks all about this type of query and how the results are as a direct effect of the Hilltop algo (Being switched off).

I'll try to dig it out again (I should have bookmarked it). If I can find it you'll see exactly what I am talking about...

Michael

Jan 23rd 2005, 10:54 am

Here is my theory:

If we imagine for the moment that Google uses a two stage process to determine the SERPs. The first stage produces the raw results and the second stage applies a number of different filters.

When a few search terms are used all filters are on but as the number of terms increases certain filters are turned off.

The probability of finding a relevant page is inversely proportional to the number of terms in the search. Allowing pages that might otherwise have been filtered to "pass through" as the number of terms increases ensures that highly relevant normally filtered pages (if they exist at all) become available.

Or to put it another way, as the number of search terms increases the application of filters become less important and the number of available pages becomes more important.

Of course it is not a complete theory but I would be interested to hear the views of others.

- Michael

ferret77

Jan 23rd 2005, 11:00 am

I would say I have sites in medium competitive areas, I don't really know how to measure competitveness becasue its objective

anyways

like I said "then wouldn't all the results be different, not just a handful"

skattabrain

Jan 23rd 2005, 11:11 am

i have a site registered in Oct 2000, it climbs from #5 to #1 with the filter.

can a 5 year old site be sandboxed?

i agree with michael... there are probably stages of different types of filters.

ResaleBroker

Jan 23rd 2005, 11:12 am

...can a 5 year old site be sandboxed?Many of the terms for my five (5) year old site are sandboxed.

EDIT: I just checked one of my sites from 1999 and there are terms that have been sandboxed too.

zez

Jan 23rd 2005, 11:27 am

My site at the moment ranks #600+ or 1000+ for my main KW. With this seach is at #6.
My site site is already 9months old. I think it takes 12 months to get out of the sandox.....

wrkalot

Jan 23rd 2005, 11:36 am

My site at the moment ranks #600+ or 1000+ for my main KW. With this seach is at #6.
My site site is already 9months old. I think it takes 12 months to get out of the sandox.....
My site was launched in October of 2002

ferret77

Jan 23rd 2005, 11:42 am

skattabrain

I have site that is from 1998 that is sandboxed to hell and is number 1 with the nonesense words

I think it has been established to some degree that the filter effects links and/or domains or some combination

Smyrl

Jan 23rd 2005, 11:44 am

My site was launched in October of 2002

He he, continually keep flunking sandbox 101. Seriously with age of your site do not think it suffers a new site penalty.

You might want to post your site to review section and see if anyone has some recommendations for you.

Shannon

dazzlindonna

Jan 23rd 2005, 12:03 pm

For those of you with old sites - do you have a bunch of new backlinks (within the sandbox time period)?

ferret77

Jan 23rd 2005, 12:10 pm

the one I mentioned 95% of links where added in the last 6 months

on my homepage which is few years old, most of links are from before that period. When I moved to Florida few months ago, I started optimizing my site for local searches like "Florida web design"

my site ranked in 2-3 weeks

on a clients site registered in 1996 , his site already had a number of higher pr links, his site ranked top 5 for his terms in less then a month

dazzlindonna

Jan 23rd 2005, 12:17 pm

the one I mentioned 95% of links where added in the last 6 months

that could very well qualify an old site to be thrown into the new site sandbox.

jamjv

Jan 23rd 2005, 12:29 pm

ferret77

Jan 23rd 2005, 2:26 pm

that article is BS in opionion, i guess its possible

there where so many exceptions in the Florida Update

you would rank no where for your terms but be number one if you added an 's' and made the term plural

plus all non-competitive phrases where basically untouched, then if you added more links to the sites they came back,

I really doubt I suddenly found 'authority' sites by trading a bunch of links

NewComputer

Jan 23rd 2005, 2:51 pm

I think we need to use 2 different terms here. Sandboxed and something else. A sandbox, you can get out of, but as some are saying, they have been held down for 5 years.... that has to be called something else. I did notice a few of mine were in the mix there. How do you get out of the sandbox again? Is it just a matter of waiting?

ferret77

Jan 23rd 2005, 4:15 pm

the sites that i mentioned where not optimized at all with links they where old school meta tag optimized before I worked on them

Lucky Bastard

Jan 23rd 2005, 8:19 pm

Me too, one of my sites goes from nowhere (well 60+ position) to position 2 with this trick (nb, to do so I need 14 jibberish -asdf not 13, maybe because the phrase I am after is 2 keywords long and not 1??).

This result is inline with my allin*: results of position 2 for the keyword in question.

skattabrain

Jan 23rd 2005, 8:25 pm

dito on that, i'm usually in good standings with my allin tags (at least for the few targeted keyword phrases).

i'm thinking it's the company you keep. if everything else says it a winner, what are they docking you for?

2 possible things stand out to me ...

1 - non relevant outbound links
2 - over optimization (if there is such thing outside of being plain old spam)

dazzlindonna

Jan 23rd 2005, 9:33 pm

skattabrain, i'm looking hard at your #1 possible thing as well.

Lucky Bastard

Jan 23rd 2005, 9:42 pm

I'm comparing this to doing allinanchor:keyword term and the top 10 results for allinanchor: for the couple of keyword terms I have checked seem to be the same as doing the -jibberish.

Anyone else?

smindsrt

Jan 23rd 2005, 11:06 pm

I'm comparing this to doing allinanchor:keyword term and the top 10 results for allinanchor: for the couple of keyword terms I have checked seem to be the same as doing the -jibberish.

Anyone else?

The results for a lot of KW's will of course be similar to allinanchor, anchor text is still a big factor.

I have checked several sites and the results are different from the allinanchor command.

HansV

Jan 24th 2005, 1:26 am

I checked out the filter or sandbox of query as well. Huge difference indeed. But wat is it worth? what does it actually tell? So some, maybe sandbox filter, or age filter, is turned of it does not tell much about how the KW ranking will ever be for your site. What is it more than just a nice play tool? Heck if this really shows the results that will apear in a few months I would get 10.000 of visitors in a day just from google. Would be nice, but somehow I can hardly believe it.

My domain is nearly 6 months old, from day one the links to it were exploding,
can I help that? did it trigger what some call the sandbox? well nobody knows, thats a thing I am more and more sure of. Arent we all just searching for patterns, but HOW we can invluense it is just a big guess.

hmm I really sounds frustrated, but its just my own conclusion.

skattabrain

Jan 24th 2005, 4:42 am

But wat is it worth? what does it actually tell?

knowing you site design is spot on helps narrow down your troubleshooting! it's helpful for me to know that there is "something" out there that needs correcting.

it's helpful for me to know that the site is designed well enough to rank.

i'm not buying the age or time factor. i agree with ferret, i've seen new sites rise quick.

skattabrain

Jan 24th 2005, 4:44 am

skattabrain, i'm looking hard at your #1 possible thing as well.

thanks but which one? i have this issue in a few palces it seems. :rolleyes:

HansV

Jan 24th 2005, 5:05 am

it's helpful for me to know that the site is designed well enough to rank.

i'm not buying the age or time factor. i agree with ferret, i've seen new sites rise quick.

Yes it is, but if you tried all and the filter is active, and we dont know how to beat the filters where do you stand form there. Thats my point. I know I should be on the first page for my main KW. The reason is that I have content that goes far beyond the compitition, I have all the backlinks you can imagine even from the mayor website that are related, with the filter turned of I am on the front page. But in reality it is not. Is it all just waiting untill mr G will turn it of. reason unkown, time when they see fit. Ok I'm getting to cynical.....

skattabrain

Jan 24th 2005, 5:23 am

Yes it is, but if you tried all and the filter is active, and we dont know how to beat the filters where do you stand form there. Thats my point. I know I should be on the first page for my main KW. The reason is that I have content that goes far beyond the compitition, I have all the backlinks you can imagine even from the mayor website that are related, with the filter turned of I am on the front page. But in reality it is not. Is it all just waiting untill mr G will turn it of. reason unkown, time when they see fit. Ok I'm getting to cynical.....

yeah, it's frustrating. do you have lots of outbound links? if yes, are they relevant?

ferret77

Jan 24th 2005, 5:36 am

if yes, are they relevant?

Maybe its my gut instinct but in my experieince releveance is never the answer

i've seen new sites rise quick.

acutally I havn't seen new sites rise quick, I have seen new links added to old sites, that already had a good links base before the sandbox period rise quickly

the sandbox would discourage making new sites for every new key phrases you think of

HansV

Jan 24th 2005, 5:39 am

in my opinion they are, but check them out and let me know what you think about them. I do have link page, but the other links are on every page.

url is in my profile, erotic art

skattabrain

Jan 24th 2005, 7:18 am

let me correct myself, i've seen new sites rise quick on other engines. so that would make that comment of mine not applicable.

** cough ** msn ** cough ** :p

skattabrain

Jan 24th 2005, 12:15 pm

according to this tool i found in a seo-guy thread, i'm so deep in quick sand it aint funny - http://www.socengine.com/seo/tools/sandbox-tool.html

crazyhorse

Jan 26th 2005, 10:29 am

Did anyone know that this function works for msn beta as well... at least it does for me.....makes me wonder/thinking?

skattabrain

Jan 26th 2005, 2:26 pm

don't know, didn't try it ... msn isn't the problem for me.

ziandra

Jan 31st 2005, 12:02 pm

Very interesting tool. I found one of my sites was sandboxed. It is a site on a free host that I set up many years ago. Three or four years ago I read up on search engine optimization where it said to load up the keywords meta tag with every word, phrase and variation of a word your site might even remotely cover. So I did. Of course we all now know your meta keywords should occur in the text on your page ;)

Anyway, I tested a half dozen of my own sites and some of the pages on them and the only ones I found in the sandbox well and truely deserved it.

Now to remove the links from my sandboxed site to my real sites so they stop dragging me down

skattabrain

Jan 31st 2005, 12:47 pm

Now to remove the links from my sandboxed site to my real sites so they stop dragging me down

... and lose your yahoo/msn ranking which is paying my bills? nah.

Jim bob 9 pants

Jan 31st 2005, 5:31 pm

if the asdf search is correct I am No. 1 for main key word, currentl 374!

dfsweb

Jan 31st 2005, 5:35 pm

Cool tool!! Did a pretty good job of analysing my sites. :) Thanks.

craige

Feb 3rd 2005, 12:35 am

HOLY COW! With the asdf search my sandboxed site ranked #1 for my main keyword.
Lets wait and see what my position will be when it gets out of the sandbox.

HansV

Feb 3rd 2005, 3:29 am

acording a lot theats on deferent bords it is posible for sites to come not our of the sandbox at all. They even stated that nobody has any proof of any site come ot of the sandbox. ( webmasterworld.com )

dfsweb

Feb 3rd 2005, 12:21 pm

I know that everyone believe's that the tool filters out "The sandbox effect" ..... but I am just wondering if maybe, it filters out the effect of PR from the SERPs, i.e: if you use the filter you see the SERPs as they would be if all sites had the same PR (or no PR) .... 'cos the results for me seem quite similar to MSN's.