renee - 7:54 pm on Oct 2, 2004 (gmt 0)

back to the topic: what and why the sandlag?

first, the things that we know about sandlag pages and believe are agreed upon:

- sites/pages are in the "index" - can find them using site: and similar queries
- they appear in the serps for non-competitive terms and hardly appear for competitive terms
- no clear pattern at this time when and how sites/pages leave the sandbox.

so how would google accomplish this and produce the above symptoms.

A way would be to use filters and penalties implemented by having "if-new-site" logic in their algorithm. This seems too messy considering that there is an easier alternative.

At this point, I bring up "supplementals", not because it is related to the sandbox (it has confused somebody previously). If you look at the symptoms, they are very similar to supplemental pages. pages are in the index and also appear in the serps for non-competitive terms. so why not use the same technology (i.e. separate index from the main) to implement this quarantine of new sites? this will avoid any messy "if" programming. what remains is to figure out when and how to migrate sites/pages from this separate index to the main index.

why would google do this? quarantine new sites? this is where the bigger contoversy is. some claim it is to fight spam. some (including me) claim google is out of-capacity in its main index. perhaps if we are able to answer this question, it will help us figure out what criteria google uses to choose which sites leave the box and integrated into the main index.