Hi Guys, I am relatively new to the world of SEO and posting a question here about Google Sandbox Phase. I started a camping related blog in the beginning of the year and have been uploading content on regular basis. At this point, I have around 150 posts on the blog. However, only 31 of those posts are indexed so far as per Google Search Console. Very recently, 6 of my posts we de-indexed by google and they are now showing up in "Crawled But Not Indexed" Category. Assuming that my blog is still in sandbox phase, I have two questions. 1. Is it normal for google to de-index a few pages during sandbox phase? (The posts are not shallow or duplicates). 2. Is there anybody else here from the camping niche who can tell me how long did it take them to see good rankings in Google? Thanks in advance to everyone for reading and responding.
Hi Google Sandbox is not officially released or announced by Google but most SEO believes it exists. Simply put, it's a process of not ranking new websites for the first few months to prevent spamming. In your case, it's not the Sandbox effect to not index your new blog posts. It's Google algorithms and no one knows how exactly they work. How much time it will take to index new web pages, it's all up to Google. Sometimes it will take a few hours or sometimes it will take too long (no matter what the content quality is). I have also some blogs written in Good English and also optimized well but take longer to be indexed. Try to build some quality backlinks to those blogs and the chances are high to get indexed, I also do the same. Don't forget to make an index request from GSC too. No, Google doesn't de-index any webpages without having any request from the user's side (like no-follow link attribute, disallowing in robots file etc.). Google penalizes websites for having spammy backlinks, duplicate content, and misleading people for other reasons. So, check for penalties in your GSC tools (Security and manual actions). NOTE: One of the reasons for not indexing new pages is an unresponsive website or website that is not mobile friendly, and takes too much time to load, so try to optimize the website for Core Web Vitals, Page Experience and Mobile Usability).