Google Sandbox

Google Sandbox

While there is no universal definition of what the Sandbox is. Most people believe it to be a mechanism which works on the domain level and affects sites with new domains. It is designed to prevent spam websites, on the basis that scammers and spammers will set up a site quickly and exploit it until it is banned and then move on to the next website. Whereas legitimate websites that are here for the duration will tough it out through the lean period and still be around in a year or two.

The effect of the sandbox is to filter your website from the results for your most competitive keywords. You may find that you don’t get any results for up to a year.

The sandbox is often used as a supernatural reason why a web site isn’t ranking when they have run out of ideas. There is considerable debate as to whether the sandbox actually exists as it seems to effect only certain websites.  As Google have remained tight-lipped, the evidence is largely anecdotal. However, the lack of results could be the result of  Google’s algorithm and how it treats links, rather than domains.

How can you tell if you have been Sandboxed?

These points were taken from the SEO forum are good advice for determining whether you are in the sandbox,  webworkshop.net. All of these need to be true to be considered to be in the sandbox.

• Your site does not rank well for its most important or competitive keyword phrases.
• The site does not rank in the top 300-400 for it’s main keyword.
• The site is on a new domain and less than about 1 year old.
• The keywords you are trying to rank on are considered competitive.
  
• Most of the pages of the site has been indexed by Google.
  
• The site ranks well for its’ competitive keywords in Yahoo and MSN
  
• The site ranks well for the non-competitive keywords on Google.
  
• The Googlebot visits and crawls the site on a regular basis.
  
• The site ranks well for an allinanchor:”your keywords” search.
  
• The site has a decent number of unique IBL’s and an OK PR
  
• The site does not have anything known to cause a ban or penalty.
  
• The site has decent SEO.
  

How might the Sandbox Work?

While these factors are all true,  the sandbox does not affect everyone. It would not make sense to Sandbox every site. There are new companies which are set up and their websites rank well. While there maybe filters, inside information seems to attribute the sandbox to filters on the links rather than on the domain age as was widely believed. This can be achieved in numerous ways, including:

Link-age or link trust: a link  can be made to count or not based on the age of the link, (grandfathering) or the credibility of the source. Links from higher PR pages can be made to count more quickly than those with low PR. Therefore, a lot of low PR links would take longer before they  counted toward your PageRank. Evidence for this comes from sites that have links to many high-PR sites can often rank well for terms. There is a growing body of evidence for this including Google Patent 7,346,839.

IP Range – the site shows a diversity in the sites that link to them. A range of IP addresses with different block C addresses.

Page-Age – the age of the document being linked to may also have a bearing in the algorithm.

Avoiding the Sandbox

Find Links from High PR Websites

The best way to avoid the sandbox is to create a quality website that has authoritative content with high PR links from relevant websites. This is a quite a tall order for your average website or blog.

Links wide IP range

Your links should be obtained from as many different  relevant websites as possible rather than obtaining site wide links on a single domain.

Concentrate on Long-Tail Keywords

If your site has lots of content, then it is easier to gain traffic for the non-competitive keywords. Unfortunately, you cannot really choose which keywords these will be, so it is important to have lots of original text content.

Optimise for Yahoo and MSN

While Google has the largest share of the market,  it is not the only search engine and there is some value in achieving rankings for Yahoo and MSN.

Conclusion

Is the sandbox real? I don’t believe the sandbox is there to prevent new-domains from ranking. It is more sutble and the idea of grandfathering links sooner for sites with higher PR, makes a lot of sense. Relevance can be determined from the hilltop algorithm and is PR is another statistic which for Google is a given. Other factors such as IP and page aging are icing on the cake.