Everyone has been telling me scary stories of this mythical "google sandbox" effect. My experience has been that it's just that: a total myth. I've been able to get brand new sites listed on the first page of google results, where the competition was several million other pages for those keywords, with no problem. Maybe I've been just lucky....?
Maybe you should give us some advice instead of just bragging ?? Show us some pages that you done and how you did it. S I am sure everyone will be very happy to see how.
Competetion is not judged just by the number of page.. But by the sites actually competing for that keyword. If you can give us some more info that may be we can comment on it (or may be get benifited too)
And don't forget that you can suddenly do very well for a few days then fall back into the pit. Fresh content can get ranked pretty high for a time but then it seems to have to compete with the rest of the boys vying for the same bone. Some might even stay at the top but that doesn't discount others' experiences that seem to say that for a time an entire site can fall into oblivion for a time then creep back to the top. This debate has been on a long time and none can really confirm/debunk it. Different sites perform differently. And, as jimkarter said it's definitely depending upon your competition.
That first week is usually pretty easy, seed it with a few links, watch the bots go crazy and shoot up in the rankings. A month later, you may only have the home page in however. I think there is some logic to building a site out behind closed doors then releasing a bunch of it at one time, I also like to age domains for a while with a simple placeholder page with a description of the site to come, seems to speed up the sandbox.
Actually , Your wrong, Matt cutts actually posted a while ago and annouced the " new content " filter and said there was a sandbox, I am not sure were his thread is but I am sure some on dp knows what I am talking about, Trust me - Try ranking a " commercial " keyword
From personal experience I started a site last June selling a product and within a month I ranked #3 for the keyword and did quite well. Two months later I was ranking outside the top 1,000 for the keyword and it took another 6 months to get back to page 1, I am now sitting at #2.
I think google sandbox is going to desapeard becuase if you think about it this filter is just to check if a website is spam, so in fact all this money google is investing rigth now will make his algo more inteligent and will make it able to detect spam in a better way at least that is what i hope, i know this sound like bad news for the black hats. Also sandbox effect exist in fact it seem that he affect only keywords that are very competitive so if you try to go for tons of keywords that are not so competitive you can match the amount of traffic a big keyword have so in the end this filter doesnt make much if you think about it.
Sandbox is more than a myth. It's a curse! Register a new domain, and try submit it to 400 directories. Google will jail it for like 1 year!
I don't think so, he has implied the exact opposite. Quote: "I think a lot of what’s perceived as the sandbox is artifacts where in our indexing some data might take longer to be computed than other data" The Google Sandbox. - Michael
That's a pretty defeatist attitude. If you look upon a site as a long term investment then you can rank for anything given the quality of the content is good enough.
I'm glad scientific, reproducable proof finally is out. I'll get Shawn to remove the Sandbox forum now it's proven beyond doubt there isn't one. On a serious note, you really call that proof? Without seeing URLs there is no proof. Misleading title IMO.
I'm guessing he's probably got it ranked either for the site name/URL or an uncompetitive search term
Sandbox exists. There is no doubt in my mind. For the first week you'll be sitting top of the tree and the next - bam - skulking in the sandbox hoping that half eaten chocolate bar is actually chocolate.... I launched a site back in March. For the first week it was top of the tree in Google out of 2.3M results. Now? Sitting at a rather unhealthy #232. It's still #1 in both MSN and Yahoo! and generating traffic/revenue but until it's allowed out to play with the big boys on Google I won't see return on the now 6 months worth of blood, sweat and tears.