Reasons For Google Sandbox

For the past couple of years I have been trying to figure out why new web sites experience a “sandbox effect” by Google and possibly other major search engines. The opinions I am going to express are my own and are based on observation and not actual fact, so take these observations with a grain of salt or maybe I should say grain of sand.

My first Internet domain went online in 1997. Back then there were about the same number of major search engines as there are today, but they had different names like AltaVista, Excite and Webcrawler. In the mid to late 1990’s all the major search engines were pretty easy to game because none of them forbid the use of doorway pages. My first website started receiving traffic of around ten thousand unique visitors per day within six months of when it went online live. All of its traffic was generated by doorway pages, which mainly indexed well on a search engine called “Excite” which was the default search of AOL at the time.

When Google came on the search engine scene, one of the first things they built into their SE was algorithms to put an end to doorway pages and as all of us old timers know, that was the beginning of the end of using doorways as a means of totally supporting a web site. This was also during the days when Google Algo was young and had not been modified countless times. Now fast forward till today and look at the various SEO techniques Google and others have tried to eliminate using their algorithm.

With doorway pages there is really only one way to prevent their use and that is to start with the index page of a site and follow all links to make sure that even the deeps ones are somehow able to be found following “visible” linkage from the main page. In my view the biggest mistake most people make is changing their content and linkage too often. I believe that Google has a long memory and it not only remembers the first time it saw each page you have, but it also remember how many times that page has changed during it life. The more often the page changes, the longer it stays in the sandbox. Why? Well, with billions of pages of content on the Internet it is impossible for Google or any other search engine to check each page every 30 days.

Other than possible spam, nothing will make a search engine look more stupid than a surfer finding a 404 or other missing page when they click on a search engine listing. So how do search engines cut down on missing pages when they can’t spider everything that often? My guess is they find pages and keep up with how many times they are modified in a particular period of time. It makes sense to me that a page, which hasn’t changed in a year, stands a pretty good chance of still being around for a couple of extra months. However, when a search engine finds a page that changes often, not only is the content changing, but there is a high possibility that the person who owns the site might remove that page entirely if it doesn’t bring in the type of traffic they expect.

While keeping track of page modifications on a static site is pretty easy, dynamic sites create different challenges for SE’s, but I’m sure there is a system they use for them as well. I believe this is the main reason that new sites suffer a sandbox effect and the actions of some webmasters will add to the length of this effect. Matt Cutts has written before that links must mature before Google will count them as backlinks. Doesn’t it make sense that content must mature in a similar kind of way before Google trusts it as well? The biggest mistake most webmasters make, in my view, is changing their content and or lay out too often and even worse than that some webmasters are constantly changing their website link structure. I believe every time the link structure of a web site is changed, all the webmaster did was restart the clock on the “sandbox”.

It is so hard to just leave everything alone when various ideas pop into our heads. However, I believe if a person can just leave the past in the past and focus only on today, Google and other SE’s will catch up and give them the credit they deserve, eventually. While changing content is bad, changing site linking structure is even worse because all links must mature, not just ones coming in from other sites. If I am right about this mature idea, then most search directories are worthless because when you add your site to one of the most popular formats, your link is always changing pages as new pages are added, so basic the link structure of the directory is constantly in a state of flux instead of stability.

Google has changed their algorithm so many times over the past few years to stop activity by webmasters they deem improper, that what has happen here is that the old doorway page prevention mechanism has grow by many factors and the only way Google will trust a page is after many months of crawling without any modifications. I’m sure at some point Google will give a site a trust factor which will allow their new pages to rank well without PR or maturity. My personal opinion is that once a webmaster creates a page they should never change that page again. In the same way you can’t go back into your own past and fix mistakes and other issues, once a page in placed on the Internet is should remain there, unchanged for the rest of its life.

I’m sure my opinions will get some raw reactions from folks who believe change is good for Internet pages. However, from my experience nothing is happening fast on the Internet anymore and the only way for a site to truly become respect by Google and others is through longevity, not remodeling.