Coming out of the Sandbox

There is a wealth of ‘sandbox’ theories across various fora all having some merit. What I would be interested in is a straw poll of the length of time it takes for new sites to come out of the sandbox and the relationship of this period to the popularity of the keyword phrase and the initial number of backlinks with the keyword phrase as the anchor text.

If any one would care to post info on their own sites then I would be happy to collate the data and hopefully draw some conclusions. It would also be useful to know if your sites are still in the sandbox as well. To start the ball rolling the info from my own site is:

Still in the sandbox: Yes

Time in the sandbox: 10 weeks

No. of Backlinks: 72

Keyword Popularity: 6,150,000 (No. of results returned by Google for the Keyword Phrase)


I appreciate there are many other factors that will be involved but I feel it would be useful to be able to say to clients it is likely to take around x weeks to start showing prominently in the regular SERPs.

Mick

 

I've never bought into the sandbox theory either, but whether it exists or not, I always tell people to expect good rankings in 3-6 months (if ever). I'm pretty good at what I do, but every now and then, I can't get a particular kw phrase to rank well no matter what. Generally, though, 3-6 months is realistic. If they want immediate results, then adwords is the answer.

 

Hi Shannon

I agree in general on the SERPs stabilising but there certainly is some 'dampening' effect on backlinks to new domains with popular keyword phrases as the anchor text. My own site has not appeared in the SERPs for the phrase at all yet but has very good 'allinanchor' placement. Others have reported that their sites have been listed (and stable) around two months after Google first indexed the site. Others still, with presumably less popular keyword phrases, report being listed after a week. It is this correlation that I'm interested in.

I would agree again but my experience is it often takes many months, if not years, to get listed in DMOZ - long after Google's SERPs have stabilised.

Mick

 

I'm not sure if the Sandbox exists but here is what I have.

Still in Sandbox: No

Time in Sandbox: 12 weeks

No. of Backlinks: 19,900

Keyword Popularity: Didn't go for one phrase/keyword. Most of them are between 100,000 and 1,000,000

 

Thanks billion.

That's a lot of backlinks. Can I ask does the anchor text of the backlinks include your keyword phrase / phrases? [Added - i.e. How many links with keyword anchor text as this seems to be the trigger for the sandbox effect?]

Mick

 

Maybe, I have no idea really. I'm still adding.

 

Most of them have keywords in the anchor text. I'm not sure about the % but maybe 70-80% of the links.

 

Shawn, do you actually think getting links too quickly will effect you in the serps? What about new sites that pop up and have overnight success, like if Bill Gates were to start a personal blog- he'd recieve thounsands of links immediately from people arond the world.

 

That's an interesting theory. When we threw the 3,500 forum sig links at the McDar page it dropped something like from #17 to #27. Your theory could explain this. Then the question is how long to crawl back, because I still believe as I assume you do that more links are better than less.

 

I have seen a lot of people quote the number of pages returned as a measure of a keyword's popularity or competitiveness. I've never thought that this was a valid measure.

I think a keyword phrase's popularity or competitiveness is reflected by the number of people searching on it. Not the number of pages returned.

Google doesn't return only pages that match the keyword phrase exactly. It also returns any page with any of the words in the content or possibly in anchor text. So a keyword phrase that contains a very common word will generate a SERP for millions of pages. This is no assurance or measure of how many people are searching on this phrase or of how many SEOs are optimizing for the phrase. It is only a measure of the commonality of one or more words in the phrase.

If you don't believe me do a search for "www" or even for "the". They both return billions of pages. Does that mean they are popular search terms or keyword phrases. Of course not.

 

I completely agree Bob - it's just the easiest (if not the only?) way of getting some feel for popularity / competitiveness. I think for purpose of making some observations on the length of time Google sandboxes backlinks it's probably the best we can hope for. As ever I'm open to suggestions for better methods.

Mick

 

I have also found that an 'old' site or page, with established links, is not impacted in the same way as new sites / pages. It would be interesting to ascertain the threshold ratio between exisitng and new links before ranking is negatively impacted.

Mick

 

Just go to Shawns Keyword suggestion tool and search on the phrase. That will give you the number of times per day it is searched on as reported by Wordtracker and Overture.

 

Okay;

Time in sandbox: 0 weeks
Number of links: 4
KW' sites total; 145,000

I've never been in a "sandbox" the site has been live for 4 months, and even though it's not ranking in the top 10 of results, I'm still listed, and so are the subpages and homepage.

I didnt' submit the site through Google, just put up a backlink on my main site (PR5) and Google picked it up and it's been there since..

Oh and how the hell do you get 19,000 backlinks

Darren

 

Dear Dazzlindonna,

I saw in your post that you recommend Adwords. I have Dubai and a Cuba holiday sites that I use Adsense on. The Dubai site, (5 months old), has a good Alexa ranking but only about 35 unique vistors a day which I am desperate to improve. The Cuba site is really only a few weeks old. I use Adsense on both. Could you explain briefly how Adwords would help in rankings. I thought if I was buying keywords from Google that they would be loathe to let me reach the top of the searches as this would appear to wipe each other out, if you know what I mean. I use Adwords for another site, www.sharm-el-sheikh-holidays.co.uk which does bring good numbers of targetted traffic which we can convert into sales.

Colin