What Is The Google Sandbox
Posted by peter on December 10, 2008 | No Comments
The Google Sand Box is not something that Larry and Sergy play in at lunch time (apologies for the crummy joke!), but it is a theory put about by webmasters to explain the strange effect of new sites in the Google Index.
The reason I say it’s a theory is because Google have not come out and said that such a filter exists.
What seems to happen with new sites is that they originally get some good rankings for 24-72 hours, but then they drop off badly. Then for the next 3-9 months, the site can’t seem to break above the 50th ranking, despite a lot of promotions by the website owner.
The theory says that it’s because Google doesn’t know if the new site is a trustworthy source of information and the Sandbox was created to stop blackhat SEO’s creating hundreds of new sites and getting very quick rankings. It’s in effect, thought to be a spam filter for the search engine.
Apart from age, the only way it seems to overcome the sandbox effect is to keep doing link building or to get some links from very high authority (pagerank 6-10) websites.
What some webmasters do, is buy domains and let them ‘age’ for several months before creating a site for it. Some webmasters even go as far as buying domains that are already aged.
If you are not in a position to buy aged domains or get high authority links, then the Sandbox is just something you will have to grin and bear for the next few months. You should not stop building links because it seems to have no effect, once your site breaks out of the sandbox (if it exists!), there will be no stopping you!