you can't just say a site is in the sandbox because it doesn't rank. If you have a new site, you can't in reality rank high for a competitive keyword immediately, that's why the keyword is competitive - because its not easy to rank for...
There are many theories to avoid the sandbox. Mine is to appear natural in your linking. See my fake boobs article in my sig for the full theory.
For those that believe in the sandbox - how do you test if your site is "in" or "out" of the sandbox? ... and how do distinguish between a site that ranks poorly (for understandable reasons) and one that is "in the sandbox"? Howard
If you have hundreds or thousand of backlinks, good PR and your site is not in top 200 searches for your main keywords then your site is in a sandbox....
Sorry, but that's pretty vague. And also very subjective! Is there an objective way to test if a site is sandboxed or not? What is "good PR"? What if a site has 50,000 backlinks - is this enough? What about 5,000? Ranking 201 is "in the sandbox" but ranking 199 is "out"? I don't see how picking abitrary numbers can ever give a clear, objective test for this. There are some key factors to rule out (you maybe had these in mind, but they need to be made explicit). Is the page indexed by Google? Is the site banned by Google? And what about the "main keywords" - how are these decided? If there's a page with lots of backlinks, "good PR", but doesn't rank well for a chosen keyword (let's say "viagra") does that mean it's in the sandbox? Even if the keyword is incredibly competitive? Even if the keyword density on the page is very low? My whole problem with the sandbox idea is that there are no clear tests to check if a page is "in" or "out". If this issue can't be decided unambiguously, there's not much point starting the debate. My own view is that most, if not all, pages that claim to be sandboxed actually rank poorly for perfectly straight-forward reasons (poor on-page optimisation, poor quality links, use of suspect SEO or linking tactics...) Howard
There is no definitive test for the sandbox. The only way to test is the ‘allintitle:’ search operator. Sandbox is just a way of describing elements of how Google ranks pages. The problem is there are so many definitions of sandbox. Take a look round this forum and you will see threads people describing the sandbox effect as indexing or as soon as they receive any traffic from Google they are out the sandbox. Sandbox is about Google delaying sites to rank for competitive keywords till they have built enough trust.
Likely people have different points of view, otherwise the world would be boring. To support my point of view, I can say that I run about 10 websites for many years. Mainly PR5 and PR6. And for many keywords with few mln search results they are #1 or top 10 in google. And when I say very competive keywords, I mean keywords with for example 40mln search results. If you can guide website to #1 spot in google for a competitive keywords, then I guess you can say that that person knows something about SEO. Would you agree with this? I gave 200 possition as a example. Normally website in sanbox for a certain keywords is not even in top 1000. And when you website suddenly starts to go to top 10 then you know you are out of the so called sandbox. Believe or not, but once you experience it, you know that sandbox exists and nowadays it takes longer and longer to come out of it.