How to leapfrog the Sandbox!

Just looking through a few threads here on initial rankings disappearing for new sites. Many people are blaming the so called "Sandbox" effect as the cause of this. Indeed, it could well be the infamous Google Sandbox causing this drop in rankings or perhaps devalued backlinks or maybe both.

If you want an easy way to bypass the Sandbox for new sites then do the following:

Take an old domain, either one you have which gets indexed fairly regularly, buy a old expiring domain or create subdomain on your main site.

Take this old domain/new subdomain and copy the homepage of the new site here.

Wait for the old domain/subdomain to be indexed by Google. If it's a subdomain then link to this from the homepage of the main site using anchor text which relates to the name of the new site (you could also name the subdomain something which relates to the name/url of the new site) if it's an older domain and you want to speed up indexing then try using http://www.onlywire.com to social bookmark it, or http://www.bluehatseo.com/quit-quick-indexing-tool

Once it has been indexed by Google 301 redirect the old domain/sub-domain to the location of your new site
E.G: newsite.your-main-site.com 301 redirects to www.your-new-site.com

Google will then interpret the new site as an old site which has moved rather than a new site which should be sandboxed.

Kudos go to Eli from BlueHatSEO for this great tip, which has worked for all the sites I've tried it on.

 

Fantastic little post this. I will be looking into it.

- Matt

 

Well, that would possibly work.....

 

I have heard from multiple sources that this does in fact work. My question is this: will that cause the old site to lose ranking since Google will interpret that the site moved? I'm not that technically savvy so excuse me if I'm missing something basic.

 

You are in fact replacing the content of the old site with the homepage for the one you don't want to lose ranking for. You then point that domain to the site which you are saving from being dropped in the ranks, so even if that domain falls down the list, you have one at the top pointing to it.
I think that is the gist of it, anyway.

 

The point is that you are merely redirecting a throw away domain. If it's a subdomain newly created on your main site, then the main site should not suffer as you are just redirecting a subdomain - If it is an old domain purchased just for this then indeed it will drop out of the rankings as to Google it will no longer exist at that location, instead it will resolve at the new domain.

HTH