There are many descriptions of what the Google sandbox actually is, but in short most people describe it as a penalty on new sites which stop them from ranking for competitive keywords and phrases. Yesterday saw the launch of the 2007 SEO World Championship and as an interesting aside, I think the competition will prove the existence or not of the Google sandbox. The chosen keyphrase to optimise for is "globalwarming awareness2007". This is an interesting choice, as whilst the phrases itself is relatively unique, it is made up of a very popular phrase, namely "global warming". One of the rules of the SEO World Championship is that only domains registered on or after 15th January 2007 will be eligible for the prize. Searching for "global warming" there are already some very highly respected and authorities sites ranking for that term. These sites include Wikipedia, the US Environmental Protection Agency and the site for the "An Inconvenient Truth" movie. Surely if the Google sandbox really exists, sites created on or after 15th January 2007, particularly for the SEO World Championship, won't make a dent in the SERPs for a term like "global warming" against the well-established sites that currently rank in the top #10? Only time will tell! Taken from my blog.
No it won't show the existence or prove anything. I won the V7N competition with a domain that was registered 1 minutes after the keyword was announced last January. There is a big difference between going after "global warming" and "globalwarming"
"globalwarming" is very different than searching for "global warming". Those are two very different terms for search engines. "globalwarming awareness2007" shows no results in any search engine by January 15
I don't deny that - the point I'm making is that if one of the sites built specifically for the SEO World Championship manages to rank in the top #10 for a very competitive term like "global warming" against well established and authority sites, surely this proves that Google doesn't put an arbatory penalty on new sites ranking for competitive keyphrases.
Helloo! Thats what happended last year with V7N, I bought a brand new domain and won the competition out of 4 million pages indexed on a new domain - hence on a brand new keyword term there was no sandbox applied, many other new domains were in the top 10
globalwarming and Global warming may sound the same but Google actually look at those 2 words as completly different. If for any reason some SEO World Championship contest site should start to rank high for the phrase global warming then the only reason would be if those webmasters added links with the anchor text global warming and optimized their sites on-page for the specific word. However, this contest will teach us all another very important aspect when it comes to SEO and Google. We will problably see if the usage of related words/phrases etc will have a big effect on ranking. That is what I am looking forward to do a little research about.
I am going to try and get a global warming list too already #1 on google but I think my seo book site has already proved that the sand box is a myth www.seobook.org.uk site took the #5 spot for seo book on google in just 8 days after register and is still page 1 after more then 6 months I havn't done any thing sense getting #5 spot time to start working on moving it up http://www.v7n.com/forums/seo-forum/33965-5-seo-book-just-8-days.html
I totally agree with you Marx - but unfortunately, some people still don't believe. Hopefully this will prove hard evidence one way or another.
the sandbox is being marketed by so-called "veteran" SEO's who are having a tough time adopting to new algos. I rank on the top 3 on google for a highly searched, highly competitive term. I also rank for a brand name of a Fortune 500 company. This is from a site that I started from scratch. "Older" SEO's wouldn't touch my project due to the fact that it will get sandboxed and will never rank for the next 2-3 years. THEY WERE WRONG. I do hope this event will prove the sandbox does not exist.
i thought the sandbox existed when i put my new sites on the air, but looking back i think it was just my inexperience with what google wanted.
"globalwarming awareness2007" This is not competitive thus it is a true show of skill. 1. bcause there are no spaces between global/ warming and awareness2007
Well think about it. It only affects competitive keywords. Thus it forces up the the PPC campaign. Sure, it is linked to domain age, link age, and link / site theme and context. Yes it gives a bit of stability. But doesn't it make you spend serious money too. Try adding obsure words to your competitive keywords. Note how there are much less PPC. If it was down to just the keywords then........... I bet that if the PPC goes above a cirtain threshold then it envokes the sandbox algo. They should call it the moneybox not the sandbox.
if that were true, and it was proven publicly... Google's stock would drop like a rock. Burn it into your memory, PPC HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ALGORITHMS!
about Sandbox thing: i've an idea about how is this working. To the brand new sites Google give a chance for 3-5 weeks to get good results, if within this time get very shortly very high popularity then keep them (backlinks from reliable places, good traffic, continuosly growing good content) if not then drop after this period into the sandbox them. With this method they can avoid dispense of good value sites but also can avoid to give long term good results for tricky sites and give more trustability for older sites. I don't know if anyone else can confirm my observation regarding this, but i was seeing a tendency with new sites that in the first 3-5 weeks they've got better results always, then usally was falling 50-60 positions in google in just 1 day when the 'test time' was over and Google Daddy said: "It' time to go to Sandbox baby now."