Google Sandbox - Fact or Fiction?

Sem-Advance, you said

but you also said

This is the sandbox.
That is, new sites cannot rank for high-paying keywords or phrases. They get crawled and indexed, and they will rank for non-paying keywords and phrases. The sandbox is a delay on new sites for particular search terms.
I have a relatively new site- still 'sandboxed'- that ranks on top 10 of SERPS for a very niche topic. However, for the main themes of the site (these themes attract advertisers), it is not even listed.
What you call a "delay" for terms like Texas Holdem, I call a sandbox.

 

Some people like to call it the catbox

the only problem with calling it a sandbox is the sandbox was an Adwords tool so it would seem hard to take a companies ServiceMark and make it some hypothetical place that your site is placed

when in reality it is simply a filter applied



Your sort of saying you will call the McDonalds BigMac a tangellorine

Call it what you want but it's not changing the facts

 

No the phrase coining "sandbox" as the age factor existed way before they named that tool. Imo they named the tool what they did in an effort to re-brand the association and muddy the waters.

-Michael

 

Well I cannot pin point the time frames for each, I know they were close to each other in inception....but I do agree it does sound plausible Google could have added that to keep things confused....

I think they were (are??) more clandestine than the CIA at times.....

 

Hm... I thought that the sandbox as an algo reference went back to '03, but the earliest I can find is Apr 04:

http://forums.seochat.com/showthread.php?p=67337

Whereas I see the keyword tool mentioned Mar 04:

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?p=229

As the 229th post in this forum.

They are def closer than I thought in time, so you might actually be right. I had it stuck in my head though that the algo was first. I was definitely wrong about the re-branding thing though, it does look like the 2 were independent of each other.

-Michael

 

Nice find...you must know a thing or two about search

All in all the point is they had to do something to defend themselves from outright spam. Be it a time delay trust rank sandbox or cat box..

All companies defend themselves in one way or another and most employ several methods, Google had to make moves otherwise they would not be the most relevant search engine and advertisers would run out the doors to Yahoo and Msn.

Its why MustRank came to be as well, to be the most relevant search engine a brand name search must result in the brand name being # 1...otherwise they're not the most relevant ....

catch 22

 

I would call that a penalty of sorts, not the sandbox.

 

Sem-Advance, such a stuff like "sandbox" doesn't exists, I agree. But something like sandbox (that effect) exists , even Matt Cutts "confirmed that".

http://www.threadwatch.org/node/4714

 

A couple of years ago I was at a Google hosted function at the plex. In discussions with one of the engineers, the sandbox topic arose, and the guy said when they first heard the term they thought it was referring to the sand on the volleyball court on the Google campus. They were pretty amused by it.

Call it what you will, Google will deem virtually all of your new sites to be riddled with spam and every other weakness imaginable until you can prove otherwise. Even if you have Pulitzer Prize worthy content and killer internal linkage, the only way you can prove it is with inbound links - the right kind of links. That's the only way out of the sandbox/quagmire/junkheap/supplemental index. And, IMO, that's the long and the short of it for organic search.

 

Call the effect what you will, it exists. Maybe we should just call it "the effect".
Sandbox, new-site penalty, delayed ranking, site-trust purgatory, whatever - I think we are all talking about the same thing.
It is applied only to the most competitive search terms.

I have not seen any example offered, so here is one. Thirteen months ago, I created a real estate agent site, www.top-agents.info. Google, Yahoo and MSN indexed all the pages of this site. Every page showed up in the SERPs for some UNIMPORTANT search terms, such as Fresno agents. Agents is not a "sandbox word" (not on the list for temporary supression).

However, for 13 months, for the words realtors and real estate agents, my pages did not appear ANYWHERE in the SERPs, in both Google and Yahoo (who have almost identical sandboxes; Yahoo copies Google, except for the initial 1-month boost they give). I consider this proof. I was not aggressive in getting links - I have very few.

After 13 months, every page now ranks for these two tough search terms. Not well, mind you, but at least they ALL show up somewhere, which they ALL DID NOT FOR 13 MONTHS.

Here is the current SERPs data, which anyone can check -
http://www.top-agents.info/site-status.htm

This is my proof of the existence of "a ranking delay effect" of some type. They just can't check out every new site manually, so they wait and see what kind of links you are getting. If I had aggressively sought and obtained incoming links, I think that I would have gotten out much earlier, as has been suggested. But I don't know that for sure. I only know what I have measured, and I have measured plenty. You just have to believe me about not showing up for 13 months AT ALL for the two search terms noted above. I have spent WAY too much time over the last year looking for my site using the tough search terms.

 

It exists.
What you need to do is build a site, and then get one of those remote controls which forward tine. Should be ok then

 

So what is the correct "term" for sites penalised by way of being de-indexed?

Col

 

I have never really suffered from a yahoo sandbox. It takes ok about 3 months to get to the first ten, but no where near as G

 

"Banned".

-Michael

 

The sandbox does exist. I have a website with high pr backlinks and 150 pages of unique relevant content rich in keywords that I planned to rank on. My website gets crawled everday but I'm not found in any of the search results.

 

Incorrect link building and sites made for adsense usuallly go to sandbox as per my experience..

 

How long for a new website it takes to bee in search results. It seems for yahoo very short time

 

What exactly is the sand box? How do you sign up for it if it really works? Thanks & hello all! Tony

 

Now thats funny. Anyhow, no i do not believe any such sandbox exists. Now more than ever new sites have a chance to rank.

 

Google Sandbox is more like testing period of your website. Google will test to see whether your website is genuine or not. It will take your site through various benchmark tests.

Once your website passes this sandbox test, google will release rankings. You can read more about Sandbox effect of Google at : http://www.seohawk.com/seo_articles/google_seo.asp