Hey, I'm curious as to whether anyone who's just pointed coop weight to a site has ever gotten out of the sandbox. I'm wondering about this because of the link aging theory - the coop links would rotate and couldn't age if that's the cause of the sandbox effect. I guess you'd get scraper type links that would be permanent, but I'd think it would take a lot longer. Anyone have any experience with this?
the sandbox has nothing to do with the co-op ads, its based on how old the domain is, so pointing co-op weight at it would have no effect to the sandbox.
Well, according to Matt Cutts at least, there isn't a domain-age based filter. It's some other filter that creates an effect that mimics that. He said something to the effect that it was industry-based and only affected certain keywords, which is consistent with what I've seen - the filtering effect on my sites only affects what seem like "commercial" keywords, and I've managed to rank for some keywords that have decent traffic but no potential commercial relation. If it's some other filter, the most likely one I think that would mimic domain age would be link age. That means what kind of links you have, i.e. co/op vs. non-coop, would be relevant to proving or disproving that idea. The other "test" I was thinking of is whether anyone who has been sandboxed and gotten out has tried ranking for a totally unrelated keyword to their site. If it's industry based like he says, then I'm curious as to whether you need to have aged links related to that industry or to anything. I know people have sites that never got the filter applied (pre Feb. 2004 or whenever the date they put it in was), but what about sites that went into the sandbox and later came out?
Here is the quote I am referencing btw: Q: Does the sandbox exist? A: Matt said here comes the audience part? How many feel there is a sandbox? How many feel there is no such thing as a sandbox? SEOs normally split down the line. There are some things in the algorithm that may be perceived as a sandbox that doesn't apply to all industries. He knows it works to keep some spam out. http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002809.html
Didnt google file the patent thereself saying new domains get an age filter applied to them? how old is that article? [edit]No i think the patent said new domains that get links pointed to them, have the weight of the links filtered or something and therefor no serps in google [/edit]
Well the quote is still kind of vague so I guess you could interpret it as including some sort of domain age filter. They filed a big patent with methods of ranking sites here: http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph...&s1=20050071741&OS=20050071741&RS=20050071741 The problem is that it lists 40 or 50 methods and it's not clear exactly which ones they're using to implement the "sandbox effect" - some of them are link-age based, some based on age of the pages themselves, some the domain, there's even a method described based on traffic to the site and how many people bookmark it. It might be some combination of all of these, I'm just kind of curious about any weird results people have had with the sandbox that might suggest one or the other.
The sandbox (although google doesn't use that name) is a filter that applies to many sectors - usually the keywords worth ranking for. You can rank #1 for non-competitive keywords within days of being indexed. The co-op has no affect, positive or negative on the sandbox. It goes by how hold your site is. On a newer domain, the backlinks are still counted, but just not used for SERPs. Google has removed most of the co-op backlinks - probably because they rotate. MSN still loves the co-op, and they even seem to work with yahoo on older domains. I would be careful about pointing too much weight too fast. There have been several experiments with the co-op. Last I saw, the charity site had dropped into the 800's with a fair amount of weight. I stopped tracking it, so it might have changed. The co-op was designed as an "advertising network" not a way to build backlinks - although it work very well for some time - and continues to do so with MSN. But to specifically answer your question, I've tested various amounts of weight on about 15 different sites - day old to 8 year-old sites. It didn't do anything to get the new sites out of the sandbox. IMO, it caused some new sites with too much weight to get removed from Yahoo. The increase in links probably looked unnatural. The sites that were over 5 years old saw an increase with Yahoo. While some new sites say an initial ranking with Yahoo, every single one was removed after 3-4 weeks. Currently, I think google pretty much ignores co-op links for SERPS no matter if the site is new or old.