In a WebmasterWorld thread linked to from the "New Sites = Poor Results in Google" entry, the term "sandbox" came about. Later on, guest author SEO Guy posted an entry here using that title The Sandbox Effect, which helped make its name. Then Garrett French, who was writing at WebProNews wrote an excellent, early recap of all the coverage and named it Google "SandBox Effect" Revealed. Since then the word sandbox has been discussed here dozens of times. But it seems to me based on the forums A site is sandboxed when it is new and does not rank for keyword phrases that are not incredibly competitive (such as a unique company name) in Google after making the page "search engine friendly" and after being indexed. Some are mistaken that a sandboxed site is a site that has not been indexed by Google. That is wrong. Sandboxed sites are very much so indexed by Google, but have a hard time ranking for keyword phrases, no matter how competitive they are. Thanks Nevin Study8Home
it's a little confusing... I always thought sandbox meant you didn't appear in the lisitings at all. For one of my sites competition is under 11,000 but it appears on page 30 despite lots of content and quite a few backlinks. There are also several sites with the targetted keyword in the domain and plenty of related content (just like mine) and these sites are also traling behind mine.
To appear in the listing one should be updating the content of the site regularly with relevant information (Theme of the site),Doesn't matter if Google sandbox you for some period of time. Its just to check and verify that the site is Genuine and relevant to the Theme.
Thanks for clarifying the term sandbox. I thought of it as a site that is not index by google. Kind regards Sam X
I dont think sandbox exists. its natural that a new site would get hard time getting on first page for a competitive keyword.
just create more original contents on your site as much as you can. Google will let you out if you drop into sandbox. If you can keep offering valuable information to your customers, then I do not think you should worry about your site drop into sandbox.
basically a site goes into sandbox when google thinks they dont have enough data to assign a certain ranking to that site. sometimes a new site launches and starts running an aggeressive link building campaign. google wants to make sure that that type of link building or appearance is natural and lasts in the long run. so they hold the site from ranking for few months. once google has data for the past few months, they now have enough intelligence to assign ranking. whether good or bad. thats why its important to start your link building slowly and increase gradually. you will never be in the sandbox this way
lol.. I was thinking you are seeking an answer. BTW, do sandbox really exists? It's not very clear and never mentioned in any official Google Blogs.
The Google SandBox is a metaphorical term coined by SEOs and Webmasters, not associated with Google, to explain why most new Websites have very poor rankings in Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS). The existence of Google SandBox has not yet been clearly proved but there seem to have some changes to Google's Algorithm sometime around March 2004 that denies top ranking for newly launched web sites. Of course, there are exceptions and many Web pages have made it to the top of the SERP in spite of the sandbox, but the sandbox seems to be an inevitable page rank dampening concept.