Is this an example of being sandboxed?

I'm quite a newbie with SERPs and SEOs. Still wondering about sandbox.

I've launched my Swiss travel site about 3 weeks ago. I can already find it in MSN and Yahoo (in fact, got traffic from MSN already).

The weird thing is, my search with complete http:// address of my website in google yields NO result. So this is sandbox then? That the website never exists in Google?

Google result page: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=http://www.swiss-travel.org&btnG=Google+Search&meta=
MSN result page: http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=http://www.swiss-travel.org&FORM=QBHP
Yahoo result page:
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=ht...Search&fr=FP-tab-web-t&toggle=1&cop=&ei=UTF-8

 

No, this is not an example of being sandboxed. This is an example of not being crawled. Let me explain. The sandbox is Google's way of "penalizing" new sites (some even talk about links being sandboxed). Since you are not listed at all in the Google index, your "sandbox timer" is not yet ticking. Recommendation: Get some links pointing to your site. If you do not know how to do that, consider submitting your sites to directories.

 

swiss quality applies in SEO as weell !! ... even more on sites about switzerland:

zerscht ufrume !

http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http://www.swiss-travel.org/

specially unpaired tags like links may kill bots
and googlebot above all

you have a bunch of errors that matter to googlebot

 

The sandbox last a minimum of 3 months. As mentioned, the sandbox has nothing to do with getting indexed. The sandbox is a filter where google will not use any of your backlinks when calculating SERPS, which means it is highly unlikely you will get any traffic for competitive keywords during this time. It can take much longer than 3 months before you will start to see significant traffic from google. You will probably see MSN traffic long before yahoo or google.

 

Thank you guys for the interim information.

I'm a bit disturbed when the W3C validator says that swiss-travel.org is invalid because of "invalid doctype". This is what my header looks like, automatically generated from FrontPage 2003:

Do you guys think the above is not adequate for Googlebot then?

This quote below comes from my other website which is listed on Google with PR5. Basically the same tags as above:

W3C check also says that the Hotel Review website is invalid! But I do get listed on Google (though I forgot how long does it take, launched this site in August'05). Does that mean I'll have to wait some more weeks before the http:// is listed on Google?

Thanks in advance!

 

it is far easier to correct all errors and it is baby easy to have 100% valid code - than to maintain hudnreds of errors

it is far more demanding to protect and maintain and finance hundreds of errors a life long

to talk about how to keep errors appears quiet a huge waste of resources

finally quality always succeeds
why be on a looser road and waste hours talking about code errors if it is that easy to correct all

there have been sufficient evidence provided in many samples in old posts about results of error loaded pages and googlebot

 

Hans,

I can't help but notice you sort of implying that my site is of inferior quality, judging from your posts about "swiss quality"

If that really what you means, I have to say that I took a great pain to compose my own travel journal, took photographs, scan them (I got no digital camera back then), designed the layout from scratch, and gave my best opinion on the destinations. Surely it's not a copy-cat of other travel websites (which I do notice to have uncomfortably similar narrations)

This topic is about the technicalities behind getting crawled and indexed by Google bot, so I hope it stays this way. I have no problem with my contents because I know I wrote them on my own and photographs that I took.

 

i am ONLY and exclusively talking about technicalities - see topic of your initial thread ...
as of today,
you still maintain some
"Failed validation, 33 errors" as per w3c
among others your doc type
and link errors such as
"end tag for element "A" which is not open."
and several OTHER mismatching tags ...
such mismatching tag erros might easily become fatal errors TO a bot
and yet SO easy to clean up
on your start page
hence still too early to complain about googlebot sandbox or so
first clean code with 0 errors
then you see within a few weeks the results

googlebot never cares about content
only about technicalities such as valid code and valid links etc

 

Oh c'mon Ajeet

This is an example of not being indexed rather than crawled. A new website will get crawled as often as an old website (with all factors except site age set equal) but is simply not in google's index yet.

 

Since when does Google care if your site validates? I randomly checked a few of the top sites listed for my keywords and none of them have less than 50 errors on their homepage.

 

yeah i agree with that. W3C validation is a total waste of time. I've dumped them long ago and still get very good ranks without any validation.

 

True. Exactly my point.

Hans, pls read what I posted on this thread in Post #5. The side-by-side comparison with my other website shows that BOTH of them have "terrible" W3C validation errors. Yet the older website is indexed and well-ranked by Google. Hence the errors should no play into consideration. It has to be something else (and then you implied about "Swiss quality" which I had to deliberate)

Back to the topic. The site was uploaded around end of October-2005. Googlebot has visited the page as shown in my awstat. Anyone here knows how long before it can be indexed? End-Oct until today is around 2 weeks, maybe too short to see it yet?

Let me know.

 

its never the number of errors that matters
its the KIND of errors that can/does make a difference

 

It might already have been index since Googlebot visited it. But then again may be not. The site might be suffering from google's aging delay...

I'm also waiting for one of the sites I recently created to appear in the google serps.

Give it sometime, we can never really really tell when with Google.

 

redQueen, that's reassuring to hear. Googlebot is very active and it visits everyday.

When you said you are waiting for your site to appear on SERPs, do you mean searching "http://yourwebsite" at Google? Or searching your targeted keywords?

 

Is this the same host who is currently hosting your other websites ?

Sometimes accidently one may host a website on a Penalty sufferring server in which case SE may not very frequently visit the servers and also not prefer these hosted sites .
That happens when your server also hosts a penalised / penalty sufferring site .

This is more common with google than others .
You also mentioned that the website was started on OCT 2005 . You should give it a little more time and if google is visiting your other websites regularly then you can link this website from their ( if related ) .
PR5 website should be getting indexed often .

Submit a sitemap . It cannot harm If not very useful .
And finally , try to get some links . If possible from sites with fair PR.(3-5)

Regards
Jeet

 

farishtaey, thanks for being a great help. I'll try to answer your questions below:

For my previous PR5 website, I've moved it to a new 200MB server. So the old 50MB server was empty, and I put in this Swiss website. Like I mentioned, the old website had no problem whatsoever, hence putting a different website on the same server shouldn't be "problematic" to Google, hmmm.

If that's really the case, probably I could purchase another hosting. But afraid if that still doesn't work, I'll run out of options!

Well, I was kinda expecting the website to get indexed by now. I do NOT expect to get hits from any sort of search keywords yet, that usually 3-4 months down the road (just as the case with my other sites). What I'm seeing now is that the website doesn't exist on Google at all

Done that, my PR5 site is linking to this Swiss site from every page, similarly with my PR4 site, also linking. And also got one PR5 guy done link exchange with me.

 

I try tirelessly to keep my rankings up in Google, it is the most important search engine on the net in my humble opinion, what I have discovered form my expierience with Google is that they add web sites to their serp's based on linking and content. Google likes constant updates of useful content that people want to read, that said it's a lot to do with common sence when it comes to getting listed in Google.

Go to the top ranking sites for your keywords and spend some time studying what they do that you don't, just cause your not getting lised in Google doesn't mean that you have a crappy site with a boat load of errors, Google has a reputation to maintain and it hard for them to keep uo on.

Google likes links to your site, but a link for a bad ranking site will hurt your site's Google ranking, so make sure that wile you are looking for links that you find quality sites that have the same kind of content as your saite, and check the Google pagerank for the sites that you solicit links from, if your looking to boost your pagerank, look for sites with a PR of 3 or higher.

Google doens't just list any site that submits to their search engine, they are very particular the site and it's content, it's not rocket sience, it's just as easy as doing a little brain work before you submit your site.

The sandbox is just Google's way of making sure that their getting quality sites in their search engine, it's will annoy a webmaster, but it's Google's way of maintaining their quality.

David C. Atkin

 

what you quoted are meta tags,
your page of course has NO DOCTYPE declaraton at all

a valid doc type declaration is to be on LINE 1 of a document and looks - depending an actual doc type used - similar to the one w3c showed you on the error page

a line 1 of an html401 document COULD look like
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">

if you have anything else but html4.01 then a bot NEEDS a valid doctype else it may misinterprete or fail to read the content correctly and wrong SERPS may result

SE "knowing" pages/URLs of a domain is ONE part
knowing the content is the key part for top SERPS

 

hans,

My PR5 and PR4 websites have SIMILAR doctype error and they rank well on Google. I suppose this is not the reason and other people has opined along the same line. I do wonder why you kept on harping the same issue?