I keep hearing that all new sites get put in the Google sandbox. My silly humor site, Say No to Crack, is only 3 months old, but I get hundreds of hits from Google per day. I have many backlinks from PR 7/8/9 sites, so I expect that my PR 0 is due to being in the sandbox. Once I come out of the supposed "sandbox", can I expect my hits to go up? Anyone have examples of your Google traffic when this happened? Thanks! Anita
One possible way to avoid the sandbox is to get links from very high PR sites. Also, you have to remember the sandbox effect is more applicable to keywords that are highly competitive.
I doubt your page rank has anything to do with being in a sandbox. I launched a new site in September that has plenty of Google backlinks but is showing a PR0. However, with the next update I expect it to increase to PR3 or PR4. Your site will probably be ranked too.
OK, so if these filters exist, once the filters are removed would I rank higher for competitive words? I'm currently #1 on like 100 search phrases, but most are relatively obscure (e.g. my site's name, in sig). Does this mean once the filters are removed I will start ranking higher on better/more keywords?
You are also not growing aggressivly, the forums i run, in 3 months were 3000 pages. Its only now, about 5 months down (with 10,000 pages on sitemap), and 11,300 in google that I am getting good traffic from google. But its not for competitive keywords, rather phrases that people may use relating to the same subject. Pierce
Sandbox does exist and you are unlikely sandboxed unless all that traffic is low search volume long-tail results which I bet a few aren't. Either way I bet you are out of the sandbox by now. That is a myth. Aggressively promoting a site never hurt no one. Do some research and I am sure you will agree.
The sandbox can last up to 9 months so you must have some good trusted links to be getting those types of rankings already. I think it depends what he means by "aggressively promoting." Normally, you don't want to get too many links to your site too fast or anything that creates an unnatural linking pattern that can trip a flag. On the other hand, if you have very high trusted links, you may be able to get away with it but it's complicated and you have to take the whole picture into account. *edit: that's quite the hilarious video on your site, Anita http://www.saynotocrack.com/index.php/2007/01/03/funniest-laugh-ever/
BrianR2 - thanks! I have a lot of fun pulling together various funny videos and pictures (and also creating a lot of my original content). Thanks for dropping by, I hope you stop back again (and/or subscribe to the feed)! I've never really focused on SEO, but was curious after I read anecdotal reports from some people who saw huge google traffic jumps after getting their first PR update, or after "getting out of the sandbox". As a noob, I was excited (and confused) about the prospect given my decent hits from Google after only 3 months. Thanks again for the info so far everyone, Anita
LOL! I just noticed the picture of Al Sharpton and Michael Jackson in an embrace. Oh, Michael, you are just being coy! Priceless.
SEOdan - I think that's part of it. Last month, my biggest single search term was "Wii Crack" (one of my contributors wrote a funny article about the Wii), and the month before it was "funny geometry". I was ranked #1 on Google for each term for at least a few days, and received 100 visitors or so from each as a result. Not huge #s for one term, so your theory holds. For the month of December, people reached my site via ~3,000 unique search phrases resulting in ~4500 UVs ... many of the phrases were obscure or bizarre (e.g. one was "elvis is a bad roommate"). People searching for humor often type in odd things.