Is your Google Honeymoon over? ..The Google Sandbox effect is known to be:
“a phenomenon that people have claimed to observe in the ranking of web pages that is performed by Google. It is the subject of much debate. Its existence has been written about but not confirmed, and several observers state that they have observed the contrary to what is claimed for this perceived phenomenon.
The phenomenon that people have claimed to observe is that Google temporarily reduces the page rank of new domains, placing them into what is referred to as its “sandbox”, in an effort to counter the ways that search engine optimizers attempt to manipulate Google’s page ranking to bring sites to the top, by creating lots of inbound links to a new web site from other web sites that they own before creating that web site.
We do not believe there is a sandbox currently in existence, although there may have been up until about 2-3 years ago or so, but not seen by us or any of our friends or contacts since then.
There are many confirmed (by cases of) Google filters you can fall foul of, but seemingly no evidence relating to this particular one. We have been involved in or observed approx 50+ new domain launches in the last 2 years and have not seen anything that looks even remotely like this effect, (although we have of course seen new sites rank extremely low in SERPs, just because they are new.
This reasoning that it only affects high volume kw searches, or very competitive searches is just silly, the reason a new site will plummet after the initial fresh content and/or Google “honeymoon” effect is simply that in competitive searches, as a new site, your site is a very long way down the rankings.
Do you really think it’s realistic to expect a brand new site to appear anywhere decent in tough searches, and stay there? It will simply rank where it should, given it’s linkstrength (including age of links etc) domain age (to a small extent, as decent links will overpower domain age weighting almost every time)
We’ve had a thread running on Digitalpoint for the last month asking to see live any examples of the sandbox and offering to take a (free) look at it to try and diagnose the the problems, or to confirm that it could in fact actually be the legendary Sandbox, no luck thus far..
So we’ll extend this offer here too, if anyone has a live example of what they consider to be a genuinely Sandboxed site, please leave the URL here in a comment and we’ll have a free look and see if we can help.
If we can’t, then it may well be that you have helped us with a real live case.. ..we live in hope. – Personally we would also like to see proof of Alien abductions and the Yeti too, but are not holding our collective breath..
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Funny you have just posted about this as i was just reading a thread on the Webmaster forums about it.
If you had asked me when i was a newbie to SEO then it was something i would probably have said yes to and believed, Now however i would disagree completely, if you do not rank then i believe there is always a reason that has nothing to do with Google holding you back.
I think it boils down to experience as it seems to be less experienced people who believe it exists as they cant see the real reasons behind why they don’t rank.
heh
..well yes although couldn’t really comment on that, as there are some very knowledgeable SEOs of the other opinion.
like here
Well im not at the same level as SEOMoz! i do think there would be more examples if it was a problem though.
Matt cuts said in 2005 that there were rules in the algorithm that are different between industries that are there to stop spam; This could be perceived as a sandbox but that a sandbox does not exist. That was 4 years ago and i would expect that similar rules still apply.
Maybe it depends how people would define the Sandbox
check out one of my posts on seomoz.. i did some testing.
lol, you cant just say “check out one of my posts on seomoz” it’s hot here, we’re lazy, you have to link to it.
My new blog seems to be sandboxed. The posts are all indexed, but they do not show up in search results. When searching on title tags of posts they posts only show up in category pages and home page. They do not show up on their own. With other blogs I own the posts show up number one for a title tag search within hours of posting.
Any help would be appreciated.
hi Dave thanks for the comment and email.
looks like an interesting case, unfortunately we’ve got an office move on this weekend now and wont be able to look in any depth until next week, will come say Hi on the blog at point.
I believe the sandbox exists, and I’m currently in it. I was ranking in #1 position for the terms ‘tim gregory seo’, ‘tim gregory agile’, and ‘tim gregory scrum’.
Searching for my name ‘tim gregory’ only would rank me somewhere between position #6 and #11.
Now today only a few specific deep pages show up in searches (means I am not blacklisted), but I’ve lost my position for the other searches totally in a very short space of time. I’ve blogged about my experience – click on my site name next to my comment to read more.
Btw, I love Ibiza… was last there in July 2008 and had a great time
we think you got it wrong Tim, left a comment on your blog to the effect that what you’re seeing is as per the post above, possibly the end of your Google honeymoon, and possibly just standard Google wierdness, dropping the site from the index for a day or two, all perfectly normal stuff with a new domain.
and as if to back me up, here you are back again..
Google search Tim Gregory SEO
forget about the Sandman, I mean sandbox, just push on and it will be fine.
yep, I think you are right. I’m now in position 6 for a straight search on my name with no other keywords, so doesn’t seem to be a penalty in place. I did go to my other sites and unlink a bit in case there were too many low-PR incoming links. Might have helped, who knows. Thanks for the feedback
OK! I’ll admit it… sandbox may or may not have been real, but it looks like any penalty I may have incurred (dropped from 9th place to 76+) is not gone – I’m back up to 3rd position for my name in Google SERPs
Hi there.
seriously, it’s just “new site bouncing about business”, stop checking and it’ll settle down in a few weeks
We’ve seen something of this nature happen to our new site, and as of yet cannot explain it through any other means other than a ‘sandbox’ effect.
The site is now 5 weeks old, and for four weeks was ranking quite well for many different terms. The kicker is, we stopped ranking for the keyphrase ‘future conscience’ which is about as uncompetitive as you can get (check, you’ll see the first page is basically all references to our site…just not OUR site!!). We now don’t even come up for ‘futureconscience.com’ searches – you have to do the full ‘www.futureconscience.com’ to find it.
We’re still indexed, we haven’t done anything even remotely dodgy or black-hat, and yet nobody can explain why this has happened – other than to presume that the sandbox effect is still a factor for some sites.
I would love for people to take a look and check out the site, see if there is anything we should be doing differently. Otherwise, what would you say is the cause of this?
hello there (my?) future conscience?
hmm, interesting, this does look like you may have hit some sort of filter.
this search and this search show you on the page.
first thing you want to do is pull all the nofollows off your site and then give us a day or two will look over it and come say hi.
Leave the thread, Digitalpoint has a whole section dedicated to the Google sandbox. Acc to me its hypothetical yet very relevant. Nice article
Yes, I believe that the sandbox exists. We have a fairly new website (under 1 year old). We are ranked result #1 on page 1 on Bing and Yahoo for almost all terms for which anybody is likely to use to search for the services which we provide, but can’t make the first 200 results in Google for anything. We are not blacklisted. Google has indexed all our pages, but we just don’t rank in search results. If that is not the Sandbox effect, I don’t know wat is.
ok i have a new website(a medical blog). i write the contents my self as i am also a doctor, the domain registered from about 4 months and the real work started 2 months ago. i got only about 35-80 google search visits / day, i posted about 20 good articles on a subdomain created a month ago .
the problem that any contents i add has no effect on website traffic i still got the same number. i add contents every 2-3 days and the pages number is about double as the first time i got the 80 users i mentioned before. but with no effect on traffic the users are just divided to the new content and the share of the old pages is less and less .
can this be a sandbox or what??
So, how can i leave google sandbox??
Can you show me how??
That’s an interesting article, I had one of my blogs in to Google sandbox once, where it took nearly six months to get some traffic from search engines, but key is don’t stop updating your blog and keep building links and you can make out of sandbox soon.
I use blackhat method and I can assure you there is no such thing as sandbox, at least not any morel;
I think my site has been sandboxed. it was no1 on google front page for the term ‘women’s underwear’ and no2 for ‘sexy lingerie’ . It’s now slipped to pages 2 and 4 overnight and stayed there. The site is about 6 months old. Can anyone suggest why this may be?
Hello there.
pardon us but the cynical seos here think this doesnt add up, and that the comment is most likely clever linkbuilding tactics (clever enough to get the link
) but we’re not going to numpty ourselves up and answer this here.
If you are seriously looking for answers / comments email on info@seoibiza.com and we’ll have a look and give you an opinion (and an apology
)
other linkbuilders take note, this is how to do it..
(and if you are a pro linkbuilder please get in touch, we need people like you)
I hate the sandbox. My site is 13 months, still in. Well optimized with 5% keyword density. Over 50,000 backlinks with some pr 8,9, etc. .Edu backlinks, the whole deal. My number 1 competitor has only 6,000 backlinks and 4% keyword density. My meta tags are good, everything indicates it should be number one. However, my competitor’s site is 10+ years old, mine 13 months. Sandbox is unfair, i hate it. I may change my mind when my site is 10+ years old, but for now I hate it.
hello there.
well as the post says, we are non-believers in the whole Sandbox thing.
If you were to check your links using this:
http://www.linkdiagnosis.com/index.php?q=http://www.spiritualbiblestudy.com
you would see this
nearly all your best links are nofollow, and some are no longer there.
..straight case of not enough linkjuice I’m afraid, get quality links and it will rank, because there is no such thing as “the sandbox”
good luck in your quest
Thanks for the advice.
Well, looks like I am out as of yesterday evening. I now rank all the sudden on the 17th page from nowhere for 13 months for my most competitive keywords. I did nothing else, my links are the same as the other day. I had all but give up on optimization. Some of my links are follow as well as most nofollow. Some are missing yes, but with nothing different, all the sudden I rank on page 17 in one day. I would have to disagree that the sandbox does not exist. This is just more proof that it indeed does, and while i was in, i hated it. Now, it is not so bad, it will keep newer sites off my tail.
hi again.
well firstly I’d say that page 17 isn’t exactly out of the woods yet, is it?
and then I’d have to strongly disagree that this is “proof” of anything, never mind the sandbox. Google actually does the best impression of God mankind have ever come up with, and especially when it comes to “mysterious ways”.
and actually another quite likely scenario could be the jolt your site would have picked up from these links from our site.
..which will be sitewide and amount to maybe 100 or more by the time Google has found them on every page.
So it is certainly not a static environment as you suggest, nor is movement now strange, nor even is page 17 even very much movement? – so in our professional opinion there is no way in a million years this constitutes proof of anything, never mind a sandbox.
still, I guess some people are just more apt to believe these things
best of luck with your site.