By bad site I mean poor content and few pages. I haven't found time to put into my site and its pretty weak right now. Will this keep me in the box any longer?
My joke site is a total work in progress, I add stuff on occasion, but on a site that makes no money, its hard to work on it during a busy time of year...but I'm not in the sanbox as far as I can tell.
I wasnt. The site is live about 2 months now. Ranks #6 for funny puns and 24 for funny headlines (I love shameless plugs) Prolly easy words to rank for, but when you are sandboxed, you barely rank for your own domain name.
There was a poster in here one night, complaining of the sandbox, lack of googlebot visits, etc. I got the url, viewed the html source, and it was the worst I had ever seen. I sent him to http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator to have a look, and to learn more about html. Just getting valid code on your site helps alot. I have seen even one non-visible via browser mess up a page's ranking... my own. Duplicated a line on two pages, and they tanked. (not great rank to begin with, but in my webmaster resources directory) If you use a template, correct and validate it first. If individual pages, you can do at least one a day...
I passed the test, no errors. My site is only about a month old and from what I hear I could have another 7 months in the sandbox. I was just wondering if google determined the length of your stay in the sandbox by how good your site is. If this is the case whats the hurry on getting my site good, I've got 7 months to play around.
If that is your site in the sig, yes, you have awhile. Real estate can be tough. Work on links. I am still not 100% convinced that the sandbox is a real, constructed filter by Google, but a side effect of other factors, so use that time to work on good, white-hat seo, and you should come out okay. BTW: http://www.google.com/search?q=http://www.apartment-spotter.com/
Hi, I've heard a roumor that the sandbox is not about the age of your site but the age of the links to it. No idea if it's true or not, but I am trying to get out too so it may be worth getting a few good links as early as possible, thats one of the things I'm doing. Like I say it's just a roumor though!