Something very strange happened to me today. There is either something to this, or it's one of the world's biggest coincidences... Today, while checking my site at Googlerankings.com, I got a strange result. Normally, this tool works about 10% of the time, so I do multiple refreshes, until I get something. Now, for almost 9 months, my site has been indexed, heavily spidered, but non-ranking. Until today. About 25% of the time (that it was actually registering a result) I was seeing a #8 placement for my keywords, which are "cad design engineering." This was odd, because I couldn't see a SERP that matched. So, I asked a friend in another part of the country to check it for me, and sure enough, I was at #8 on Google. (from having NEVER ranked before) In short time, I was also seeing the same result. NOW.... for the weird part. I do not obsessively monitor this site. I wrote it off as dead some time ago, and started relying on my PPC campaign to drive most of my traffic. So today, when I searched my stats, I saw that I missed a keyphrase for AdSense. I had "cad design," and "cad design engineering," but not "cad engineering." (thank you AwStats!) So, I went to AdSense early this AM, and edited my keywords to include the omission, and a few minutes later... NO MORE SANDBOX! (I had just done several checks before changing the keywords in my PPC campaign) I'm probably being a moron, but if this is a coincidence, it's comparable to winning powerball. Can anyone else help me to verify when my ranking went into effect? Thanks, and I hope there's something to this...
i had some sandboxed sites get rankings today as well.. only on certain datacenters though. a data center i took note of is 66.102.9.104, which was mentioned by googleguy as a DC that may show the direction this jagger update is heading.. i'm not going to jump around at the site of these rankings though. they may have just lifted a filter for a day and tomorrow these sites could drop right back into sandbox hell. it's nice to see they should be ranking highly though, i guess..
In the last 2 weeks, I've actually been seeing my Search Keyphrases list grow almost exponentially. Google has overtaken Yahoo as the #1 results producer for my site, and I have not been able to see any of it - up to now, that is. So, if that's any indicator, I'm guessing that it's not a fluke, or a "here today, gone tomorrow," type of situation. Anyone else have a take on that?
Are implying that by buying keywords in AdWords (I assume you meant AdWords - not Adsense in the post above) you removed yourself from the sandbox? If so, I hate to burst your bubble, but that's not the case. Using AdWords doesn't have any effect on how your site is listed in the organic results.
if you check on mcdars datacentre tool, the early results (yes about 25% of the time) were being seen on 66.102.11.104 & 66.102.9.104. This now seems to be propogating round the others, so pretty likely the changes you have seen will enventually stick. its wierd though. our rankings for our most popular search terms have dropped on these datacentres, yet business levels have seemed to have increased today. lets hope it lasts! good luck with the sandbox
I know that there's no acknowledged "connection" between organic results and AdWords campaigns... But like I said, it is a huge coincidence. (I view it more in a humorous light than anything, because something the scope of a Google datacenter could never react so quickly to any such change)
i thought you were talking only about PPC placement.. if instead you meant that as soon as you bid on a new keyword, you also saw new, high organic rankings for it, then i get it =)
Yeah, I was trying to verify the coincidence, by 1) getting "sandbox" feedback from others, and 2) trying to figure out when this change took place. Is it possible to time stamp a new ranking? A little poking around has yielded much stir about rankings and movement... This is a good thing!
solid7 you make a very interesting point. Could it be that Google in someway rewards sites that has a Adword campaign. (I haven't read any documentation about this but it figures) Afterall it is unlikely that a spammer will pay to drive traffic to their spammy website. Google may realise this (I'm sure they do) and so concludes that the site is unlikely to be spam. I am sandboxed now but will try some Adword campaigns to see if it makes a difference.
You could also use the opposite logic. Since you are paying for Adwords, Google rather keep you in the sandbox longer so that you would not rank organically and you stay in Adwords and pay more for advertising. Personally I think there is no connection between Adwords and Sandbox, though I wish it was that easy.
tzimisce, I think you're probably correct. I will start turning off certain keywords in my campaign, once I start ranking for them organically, as I have now done. My strategy is to achieve a ranking for all the words in my campaign, and to wean myself from AdWords altogether, once I've gotten a decent ranking for everything that I want. It's just that it's so hard to tweak a page before the Google ranking, because you risk screwing up the high rankings in the "other" SEs, and not knowing what's going to be good for Google. For 9 months, however, I've had to rely on AdWords. I would've gotten NO traffic from Google without it. Perhaps this is the REAL reason for the "Sandbox," eh? (I think I'm seconding your suggestion)