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They seem to grow at 10% per month, from a very low start, whereas last year a site would be getting 2000+ visitors per day within the first month.
I wonder whether some people who say they are out of sandbox really are. Its all relative, and for us, last year was the golden age of launching sites.... sadly those days have gone.
Is there a fast track out? I don't think so, I think you have to acquire an 'established status' with a range of natural links in which takes time and luck. You can rank well for the odd phrase, usually triggered by hilltop effect, but nothing dramatic until you have the mix of links in, which is difficult to accelerate or achieve with link exchanges.
Damn it, you now have to build quality sites with longterm objectives :)
Does well on Yahoo! and MSN... Oh well...
All new sites this year have got nowhere for us!
I have seen the same here. Sites put up in January and February have had good PR and good links for a while, but are struggling badly in the serps.
In addition, any new pages added to existing sites, even ones with very strong PR, take at least 45 days to get off the PR0. I have read that some folks have ways to get out of it quicker but the only thing that has worked for us is patience.
That is because you do not understand what it is. It is for 100% NEW DOMAINS ONLY. Try actually launching a new site before you chime in with your backlinks theories billy.
greg
I have older sites 2+ years that are also experiencing the "sandbox" problem. I think that it is not just new sites that experience this. I think what happens is it takes Google a while to penalize new sites, so they enjoy sometime where they rank normally. I think after Florida Google is penalizing commercial sites for commercial terms. The only way it seems to avoid this problem is to establish a directory style site with lots of local rank.
I have old and new sites with high pr's and strong content that are affected.
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I've got new sites that are fairly well indexed, within a few days of pointing a few links at it, but they're not ranking in the top 1000 for even non competitive terms - it's the ranking that's the problem at the moment, rather than the speed of indexing.
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Have we made matters worse by linking to our two other sites owned by the same business?
The main site is MEDICAL WIDGETS, products we sell.
Another site is called MAIN THINGIES ADVICE
By exchanging links between MEDICAL WIDGETS and the two other sites have we made it harder for the new site to get seen because the new site is now viewed as an 'affilate'? And, am I right in thinking that with two pages on separate affilate sites aimied at the same search term, the more recent site get overlooked?
So how do I tell whether its sandboxing or suppression of the main search term because of linking?
We have also a ONE way link from MAIN THINGIES
ADVICE TO the new site.
Inside pages are popping up; some are doing really well but the terms are very uncommon.
In an effort to spread the PR throughout the site I've put the index on every page including the index page. Will this help to get the inside pages seen by getting a better ranking?
Sandboxed as we are, is it best to remain passive or try and fight your way out of it?
IMHO, too many people came to rely too heavily on short term successes achieved in part by artificial PR (i.e., PR almost exclusively of their own making). I believe that artificial PR was at the heart of this particular problem, and that G just took a step to slow those who for so long boasted that, "Hey I just launched my site last week and I'm already up to XXXXX pageviews and $XX,XXX a month." G can't possibly have thought that that was a good thing. I cringed every time I read a post like that.
I often do not like the choices that G makes (their implementation of the Florida update was, for example, mean-spirited at best). But, what they do is rarely illogical.
Agreed. It's not just new sites that are effected. Though it's difficult to spot on an existing site, if it's been performing well.
Interesting you say the only way to avoid this is to build a directory style site. Because there're many that believe the sandbox is just an extension of the new algo. So if you meet the criteria for the new algo, no sandbox?
Please elaborate. What do you mean by local rank?
Agreed with Mhes and RussellC, those sites that I launched in late 2003 and especially in 2004 are in the same fate as yours.
It looks like as though old sites have an advantage over new ones in having its exposure in Google, however, I recall that GG used to comment that "age" is not the factor in ranking or PR (one way or another - I cannot recall the specifics).
During the past two days, I have been playing around with some samples in my niche, especially those sites that have great exposures of subpages ranking across the broad in Google. A common characteristic is that they are in the game long enough to get natural inbound links in great number - most of them are either one-way and organic or having been artistically manipulated).
For example, one big site of mine got 5 digits number of natural links (90%) while I had reciprocated only for around 200 links in the past and stopped doing that for years. For the main keywords, there is no where to be seen but for the secondary ones, they are in tons with good exposure on Google first page. Then I observe that a number of my competitors who often show up as the same old faces in the same serps as mine...ah they bear the similar characteristics of inbound links as mine as well!
As I said above, "most of them are either one-way and organic or having been artistically manipulated".
To run in long term especially to the future from now on, you need to have the site that is good enough to attract natural links without your awareness of them. It takes your efforts and times.
P.S. Thanks to Marcia and Imaster for introducing "awesome" Yahoo link command in another threads.
This scenario is repeated over and over again for the different categories. I noticed the title of the thread was changed. I too, don't like the 'sandboxing' term It should be 'quarantined'.
Whatever it's called, it makes Google look bad. Maybe if we spread the word around that Google's Index had reached capacity prior to the IPO, they would let us in.;)
>>> The exact same pages that used to rank number one for many many searches are now nowhere to be found, even though they have the old links redirected plus new links.
How about if the [bold]redirect[/bold] of old links to new pages/sites are sandboxed or quarantined too? If you don't like these two words, then may be a withholding period? I guess redirect of old links does not bear immediate effect for G to credit the links. Just a pure guess, but the symptom seem to imply the message.
Since you split the site, that might be an added factor of negative effect (not sure temporarily or permanently). The size of your site changes and perhaps the internal linking structure.
BTW, I try to mean G acknowledge the redirect to crawl the old links to new pages/sites, but treat them as "new links". If this turns out to be true, that would be one of the worst scenarios that you are facing.
Local rank is achieved by getting links from non-affiliated sites. This means links from sites with different ip addresses (different c-block). Pr looks at any link as having value (as a recommendation of quality) but local ranks looks at who is making the recommodation.
The directory style site is partly a conspiracy theory, so if you are tired of conspiracy theories just skip this part. My belief is Google has looked at the difference between commercial and non-commercial sites and noticed a very easy way to distinguish the two. Non-commercial sites generally freely link out to non-affiliated sites where as commercial sites will generally only link if there is a benefit for them to do so (i.e. a reciprocal link or to achieve a link boost). Here is the conspiracy part. With Florida Google began to remove commercial sites from ranking for commercial terms in order to encourage advertising. By using the method of distinguishing between commercial and non-commercial sites Google was able to achieve this; however, the results really suffered because what remained were directories and generally not relevant ones at that. Google however is not dumb so it got better at increasing the relevancy of the directories it retrieved. I notie that now Google provide excellent results if you are looking for relevant directories. However, if you are looking for real information sites or commercial sites it is horrible.
So how did sandboxing come about. Well new sites cause a problem because at first there won't appear to be an affiliation so new commercial sites might appear to be non-commercial at first glace until affiliations could be established. Thus new sites enjoy a brief moment of glory until Google can classify them as commercial then toast them. I noticed Google is getting quickier about doing this, so sandboxing might not be noticed as much as time goes on.
I don't even use Google anymore because my business requires finding commercial sites. Yahoo is excellent for this. For those suffering I recommend encourage others to switch and never buy adwords.
Google have a nice IPO ;)
sites aren't sandboxed/quarantined/suffering from lag time, off site inbound links arePerhaps, then, you could explain the difference.
Links don't get measured the same way anymore. Those who put up a new site and linked their other 42 sites to the new site, and previously enjoyed success, don't anymore. And that changes *everything*. At least not short term
And this is likely just a transitional phase, before it gets worse. If they don't like your site enough now to feature it for 90 days, will they feature it at all in the future?
G keeps looking for ways to identify what it views as true value. Look at all they've been saying, and doing, and not saying, ever since Florida. Florida, AFAIK, still reflects their true intent, even if the algo's have been (temporarily) rolled back since then. It won't last.
Those who are preparing for Y! as being the main SE for commercial results may be over-reacting, or they may be wrong, but my money says, that's the way to think if you run commercial sites...
But my crystal ball doesn't work any better than anyone else's. ;-)
To be optimistic, I think this is a good trend. Google helps us kill new competitors. The delay of crediting new links is so long and many people who have no faith in Google and in themselves would just give up before the fruits ripen. People with small pockets could hardly survive too during the period of turmoil.
In many occasions, we have been discussing about 90 days period and I suspect that this period could have been prolonged to 180 days and that is what I have observed today.
