Feb 2007 I launched a travel website. In the first week , google rankings were pretty good, then suddenly the site vanished from the radar - for a whopping 17 months. July 16th 2008 it suddenly appeared where it should in the google rankings - for 17 months google had been sending it a measily 10 visitors a day at most, then suddenly, out of the blue, it's now getting over 200 visitors a day from google search and climbing rapidly. That's a 20 fold increase in traffic in a day. What did I learn? 1. The Google sandbox is very real and does exist. 2. Patience really is crucial. After a year in the sandbox I started fretting about the site and why it was getting so little search traffic from google.com. I did all sorts of tinkering to try to help it's release from the Sandbox, which may or may not have had an effect. I suspect the tinkering had little effect, but actions I took included: de-optimising pages; removing many of the affiliate adverts; adding the meta no-follow tag to affiliate adverts; adding the no follow tag to almost all outbound links. Whether any of these actions helped I've no idea. 3. Best way to get out of the Sandbox seems to be to design a site, work hard on manually adding lots of inbound links (I added about 5 a day on average), then forget about out it for months. I went on holiday for 2 months, and didn't touch the website for that period. The very day I returned, the site was released from the Sandbox. Sweet. 4. Sandbox doesn't affect all sites. I've other very similar travel related sites that never received such Sandbox treatment. 5. Sandbox doesn't seem to affect Google image search results. For much of the period the site was in the sandbox, Google Images sent hundreds of hits a day, and rankings for image searches were very high. 6. Best way to check to see if your site is sandboxed is the do a search in google: yoursitename.com + a keyword prevalent throughout your site. e.g. if your site is about hotels in Italy (for example), search: yoursitename.com + Rome. If your site doesn't appear at the top, but rather lots of sites that link to your site do, then you're in the sandbox. Just be patient!
Congrats im sure learning how Google looks down on site teaches everyone a lesson I gut shut down tooooo
Maybe.... but the site has hundreds on pages of high quality, unique content. "Good links"? What does that really mean? The site was PR5 for months, yet never got any google traffic. Maybe too many of the links were from high PR blogs, forums, etc.... Yes maybe ..... Hard to tell.... Length spent in the sandbox.... i think the greater the competition the longer you spend...and the longer you spend in it the bigger the bang when you're released.....
If in a sandbox I would recomend: - Check for duplicate sites/duplicate content. - Check for any site problems. If you are sure you are in a sandbox then I would: - Link Build at highly respectable sites. i.e. DMOZ, Yahoo, Business, BOTW This will increase the credibility of your site and hopefully get you out of the sandpit.
I think if you do alot of link work on the site and it is larger site you have a higher chance of getting sandboxed. I to believe it is very real and honestly makes sense from a search engine - pay per click point of view and profitability of a search engine. A larger site that is new with a lot of content generating alot of links may mean that the people behind it have a budget, sandbox it and hopefully they will do pay per click.
I thank you for the very informative information. It has explained a lot to me about the whole sandbox thing. Good luck with your site!
PageRank has nothing to do with the sandbox. High PageRank means you have enough links from pages with high PageRank. Being in the sandbox means you don't have enough links from trusted sources. Usually, low PageRank pages have few links, which means they have few links from trusted sources as well, but otherwise there's no correlation.
Thanks For The Information Mate.. That Has Some Hope For Me And fantozzi thanks for the info the pagerank related stuff...
Congrats, must have been a _huge_ relief for you. I had the site in my sig in the 'sandbox' for 4 weeks. (Well it is only around 5 week old domain) and I was glad to see it pop out and be ranked in the SERPs.