People loved my previous post about sandbox, so I thought this might be useful. All the tips are based mostly on my experience and some of my sites which succeeded to avoid the sandbox and ranked high in google from the first weeks after being indexed till now. Sandbox is the term for new sites which are not treated well by google and are not allowed to rank high on good keywords during the first 6-9 months after they've been indexed first. The existance of sandbox was approved by some google emplyees, including Matt Cutts. Google loves more old and established sites (this is the reason why DP threads rank so high in Google...) more than new ones and sandbox prevents from new sites to rank high on competitive words What you can do prevent it: 1. Buy an old domain. Use www.domainsbot.com and www.snapnames.com to find good expired domains that are indexed by google. If you are ready to spend some money buy an old and established domain with lots of backlinks. 2. Don't add too many links at once. If you are planning to submit your site to directories, better submit to 10-20 directories every day instead of doing it all in one day. Try to add a reasonable amount of new fresh links every day. 3. Update your site frequently. By updating your site every day you let google think that your site is very important and popular and probably has lots of good content. Try to update every day and add new pages, also update the main page frequently. Most webmasters underestimate the power of frequent updates, while it's one of the easiest and yet most effective ways to get ranked quickly. 4. Try to rank for less competitive keywords. If you can't get ranked for good keywords, try low competitive ones. For example if your site is about SEO and you probably can't get any traffic for "seo", try to optimize for "how to avoid sandbox" or "how to get backlinks" etc.. 5. On page optimization. Use your keywords as much as possible, but still so the content makes sense. 6. Get links from well established sites. Few links from old domains and trusted sites can help you much to avoid sandbox and rank high quickly. The best is getting links form .edu domains, but this is usually difficult and expensive, though well worth the price. Also links from old and established sites are very good. There are thousands of sites mostly related to programming which are as old as the www itself and have high PR and lots of backlinks. Such sites don't earn much to their owners, so you can usually get links for quite cheap. ~ Michael
I have sand in my shoes all the time lately. I have no backlinks I should go buy some. Where you get your links?
Do you want to buy new shoes or links? That depends on your niche, better buy links from your competitors. Sometimes you can find good links here As for shoes, ask shoemoney, he should know lol ~ Michael
Now, join the Co-OP and make a FAQ on what to do with new sites and the CO-OP. ie, how much weight is good for a new site to keep it out of da sandbox?!!
Intresting read, never thought the edu domains have more weight. I shall give it a try, nothing to lose, google hates me.
lol, in that case you really have nothing to lose. Why do you think so, is your site banned? There's also a little trick to get some good authoritive links. search for .edu forums or blogs on your industry and then put there your comment and a link But only add useful and interesting comments, unless it's spam. For example, if your site is about dogs, look what you got here
No my site is not banned, just that have not got any good results on the big G, through doing good on yahoo. Thanks for the trick, I shall try it out and I do hear you on making the comment useful.
It takes some time with google before your site starts to rank, but meanwhile you can target low competition keywords. Yahoo is great too, I never succeeded to understand what is needed to rank at yahoo , but I'm good with Google and MSN
Yup thats what I am doing, targetting low competition keywords. But the thing is, I am doing very good with yahoo and sort of been neglecting google, now I need to slowly start working towards google too. Though yahoo is great, but the real traffic king is the big G. But thanks for your tips, very helpful.
My site has been sandboxed for about 6 months now but recently I have noticed that it is showing up on Google for about half a dozen obscure keywords. Do you guys think this is the beginning of it coming out of the sandbox and if it is, by your experience how long will it take before the site get some decent traffic from Google?
Even while in the sandbox, the site can rank good on some low competition keywords. You can easily find out if you're still in the sandbox by checking out what are the sites which rank better than you. If your site is like 300th and there are plenty of forum posts, stupid one page sites and blogs with almost no links and little or no relation to the keywords, you site ios probably still in the sandbox.. (that's the situation with my www.hyipbest.com, it has hundreds of links and lots of good related content content, ranks number 3 in MSN, but google only put it on the 30th page lol, though I'm getting lots of traffic from low competition keywords) But if you can see that all the sites which rank in G higher than yours have better content, more links, higher PR etc.. than you're out of sandbox, but you'll probably need to try harder to get some serious traffic from G hope it helps, Michael
Thanks for taking time to post this! This helped me understand the term sandbox which is being used (a little too much I think). Do you know of a tool that will give me the original registration dates of expired domain names? I picked up a bunch of expired domain names, but I dont want to go through the WayBack machine for everyone.
Thanks for your insight. Any thoughts on an established site, with a #2 rank in a pretty good search, going to outside of 10000 on Google? It seemed to be related to the last update, and there was a PR7 link that disappeared, but I replaced the link and saw it come back for a few days, then bounce around for a week, then disappear. 4 more PR7 links haven't helped. I'm just lost on it. It's at 2005calendar.com Thanks, Bobert