What's the longest you can be sandboxed?

yea im with live-cms.com and sorry to say think that article on business world blogspot.com is utter tosh. It even hints at the real reasons without actually drawing the correct conclusions.

*darts* 24 million pages

*dart shop* 281,000 pages

the search is 10x more competitive, what on earth makes you think you'll be able to get showing in a search as big as that (dont know how competitive it is, havent looked at how good your competition are) straight away? youre in the search, just somewhere further down than youre looking.

the article states over and over that "the sandbox seems to apply to the more competitive terms, and the more competitive the term the longer it seems to last" .and this is Google deciding to penalise is it? ...not just a brand new smallish site adrift in the mighty ocean of 29 billion webpages?

it's just unrealistic expectations dude, target your more localised terms first, your customers buying phrases (which you have done an excellent job with btw, #1 for dart shop when looking today) and all the long tail terms,

white darts, long shank darts, red and blue spotted darts etc. that's where you should be looking (...if youre not already, again, as havent researched)

why do you even want "darts" ? do you really want to try and compete with wikipaedia, the world darts federation, every news website, youtube, and the 24 million other places the word appears? the vast majority of those searchers wont be buying your darts, and Google is absloutely right to not have your dart shop as the most relevant site for the *darts* search.

obviously it would be a prestige thing, but its a totally unrealistic target as far as Im concerned at 4 months in, it would be like us trying to go after *SEO* with a 3 month old site and announcing that our lack of performance is because we are sandboxed.

its not, its because we cannot possibly hope to compete with the SEO giants that have been around years, yet, if ever, and attempting to do so would be a HUGE waste of our time.

customers buying keywords is all you need to remember from this rant

 

ah now this is different.. massive amounts of sitewide links can and do bomb a site for a little while, weve seen this a few times now. there does seem to be some sort of upper threshold with links being added too fast or from the same place which if you go over will drop sites 10 pages sometimes.

its usually only temporary, 2 or 3 weeks and it will creep back again, often to higher than before, but it's not nice is it? have had a few panicking clients who have done this to themselves, and we've played with it on our own site a while back, webbieworld is one that can do this to you.

you start getting loads of PR5 links, and think it's great, and the site immediately disappears 15 pages off the radar. quite disconcerting

 

Oh Cheap SEO.....dont say that!!! The thoughts of 7-8 more months in the sandbox will kill me

 

Very well explained. Kudos.

 

Thank you SEOibiza.

What you are saying makes sense. In all reality I have been here 3-4 months and i expect to rank Top 10 in Google.

Damn.....I agree. It is unrealistic to expect this and if i have to be honest, the site hasn't and probably wont, earn this. Fact being a fact it is probably best descrobed as being an AVERAGE site. No great, not bad, few nice things and few not so nice so yes....average sums it up.

I dont need world wide Top 10, i will settles for Top 10 in Australia. Im interested in conversions, not being on top for ego reasons (although that would be nice )

Unfortunately the word everybody types in, is DARTS. every other longtail such as buy darts best darts etc does not , even combined, come close to Darts. So to make it, i need to rank higher but that brings you back to time, trust, links, content, marketing etc.

I suppose being truthful again, being so keen, you sort read these threads and read them into your own circumstances.......

You have opened my mind and taught me a few things.

Thanks for that I appreciate it.

 

I agree. I think the length of time depends on the competition. I know I could make page 1 for "chocolate fudge supreme" next month. However, ask me to get on page 2 for viagra, mortgage, dating, etc, withing 2 years, and all bets are off!

 

Blah blah blah Sandbox doesn´t exist posters.

Just because you personally haven´t experienced something, doesn´t mean it doesn´t exist.

I´ve 4 travel related websites. 3 have been sandboxed and subsequently exited, generally after 6-9 months ( in my personal cases). The latest site I did wasn´t sandboxed and has lovely rankings in google after just two months.

I can totally see why some peope might dispute the existence of the sandbox - because they haven´t experienced it. But when you do experience it, it´s blatantly obvious that it does exist. Eg:

One 3 month old PR0 site of mine (with under 100 inbound links) gets good rankings when I upload a page.

One 11 and a half year old PR5 site, in a similar travel related niche, happens to still be sandboxed. This site has over 1200 one way incoming links. If I were to upload the exact same page to this site, rankings are nowhere to be seen.

 

Blah blah blah Sandbox doesn´t exist posters.

Just because you personally haven´t experienced something, doesn´t mean it doesn´t exist.

I´ve 4 travel related websites. 3 have been sandboxed and subsequently exited, generally after 6-9 months ( in my personal cases). The latest site I did wasn´t sandboxed and has lovely rankings in google after just two months.

I can totally see why some people might dispute the existence of the sandbox - because they haven´t experienced it. But when you do experience it, it´s blatantly obvious that it does exist. Eg:

One 3 month old PR0 site of mine (with under 100 inbound links) gets good rankings when I upload a page.

One 11 and a half year old PR5 site, in a similar travel related niche, happens to still be sandboxed. This site has over 1200 one way incoming links. If I were to upload the exact same page to this site, rankings are nowhere to be seen.

 

Since when is age an important factor in ranking (other than the sandbox argument)? It's the quality and relevance of the backlinks that make a site rank, not the total backlinks and PageRank.

And don't the people who believe in the Sandbox say it stays for only 6 months anyway? So a different explanation for your 11 year old site is necessary.

 

yea have to agree with mr cms again, at 11 and a half years old and PR5 thats not a sandbox issue either. could we see the URL for this one?

maybe we can collectively give you a bucket and spade to dig your way out?

 

But still your keywords dont feature as much as they should . It may be still the sandbox effect.

 

If a site has pages with long tail keywords being searched than would it be accurate to say the site is in the sandbox? i.e.: perhaps a main keyword page is in the sand but if other pages are not that what does that mean?

I find there are certain words/phrases that take a month or 2 to get on the first few pages but than other terms go to page 1 in 4 hours. I have an opinion on this matter. 1 is that the engines are trying to figure out what to do with the 'sandboxed' page. Or, perhaps it is a term with high paying keywords and prone to spam. In that case they have a filter that treats that page differently that other pages on your site. The sandboxed page will have to be treated differently. You are going to have to work it naturally. Don't load up on inbound links too quickly to that page. Do it slowly and naturally. I think this page has to "earn" it's position on page 1. You have to convince the spider that it deserves to be on page 1 and that it is not spam. This would be done by internal linking, an article submitted to directories, a squidoo page, inbound links with targeted anchor text, etc... but all done naturally and slowly. There really is not definition to the word slowly other than not unnaturally fast.

I just got on page 1 for Ultralink Cables for my site. There are not too many pages served for that term but for some reason it took weeks while I can post other terms and get on page 1 within 1 or 2 days with much more competition. Therefore, my conclusion is ultralink cables might be a higher paying keyword (no i have not researched it). My site is all about cables BUT ultralink cables are for home theatre and my site is not about home theatre.. So, did I confuse the spiders and they needed a month to sort it out? was it sandboxed? I dunno.. but, I did go and place a link to the page with the anchor text and shortly thereafter I made it to page 1.

 

"One 11 and a half year old PR5 site"

Oops, confusion created..... I meant 11 and a half month old site (not year).....

 

can you tell us the url so we can see a sandboxed PR5 site ?

 

After going through all there,i think my symbian blog has been sandboxed.It is about 10 months old now.It was doing well in serp since past 4 months.
This is not the first time that this kind of thing happened to my blog.

There were 2 previous incidents which were short lived.(of 1-2 weeks) but now its going longer.
This thing happened since the last pr change.Now my Blog ( http://mys60.blogspot.com ) has a pr3 and i strongly feel that earlier sandboxes happened during the pr change.

Do anyone support this theory?