Hi, I've got some questions about the sandbox: 1. How do you know that you are in it? 2. If you are, how long do you stay in it? Thanks.
These two questions quite neatly get to the heart of the whole sandbox debate. For people who believe in the sandbox, you will no doubt receive a wide range of very different answers. In terms of question 2, I've seen figures range from a few weeks to many months. Figures of 3-6 months are probably the typically quoted values. Question 1 - well, I've been trying to get a clear answer to this one in many different forums, and I haven't had one yet, so good luck! The bottom line is, there is no clear test - which is why the debate is pointless (why debate something if you can't objectively and reliably test if you're "in" or "out"?!). Some answers will say: "if you don't rank well for your keywords, you're in the sandbox". Let's assume you've done some basic checks (you're in the Google index and haven't been banned). What's the cut-off point for "ranking well" - in the top 100? How do you distinguish sites that "should rank higher, but don't because they've been sandboxed" from those that don't rank well because they haven't been well optimised? There's also a lot of talk about the sandbox only affecting "competetive keywords". How do you get an objective measure of what a "competetive keyword" is? To me (as someone who is highly sceptical about the sandbox idea), the lack of any common view on these questions underlines the fact that when people say "sandbox" they may be talking about one of about 100 different ideas. To talk about "the sandbox effect" is probably a waste of time - as they are so many different ones! Personally, I'm sceptical, and believe all the symptoms usually attributed to "the sandbox" can be explained by other more straight-forward phenomena (e.g. lack of optimisation, spammy links or link growth). Blaming the sandbox seems to be an attractive option for many though. Howard
Thanks Howard for the very informative reply. I just hear sometimes some SEOs use the sandbox as some excuses for not making the site as optimized as they promised.