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Thinking about new sites. Will high quality content sites get indexed quickly? Is anyone doing anything to get indexed quickly?
The courts would *never* force a company to provide you something for freeIf the company were a monopoly, there is no telling what the courts might force them to do. If the company were providing a barrier to entry into a given field based on whether or not the start up could afford to pay them or someone else advertising costs to get in.
I run an information website, pure content. I'm following the general advice on how to be successful in Google - in 12 Months! Not overnight. If your "selling" your clients overnight success, that is your problem - The rules are clear.
My newest website has about 250 pages of content right now - nearly 4 months old. Google shows nearly every page and visits daily to grab my index page, Yahoo has about 1/3 of the pages, MSN Zero.
Talk about stale? MSN's experimental bot was all over my site for weeks, sucking in hundreds of pages - the entire site multiple times. Slurp is a regular too (again, sucking in all my pages multiple times), but those 80 odd pages they show are months old.
So how is it that Google is showing stale results? Do you really think the average user cares about the Google sandbox policy?
Some folks should spend more energy improving their websites and less time complaining that they can't manipulate the results.
If the company were a monopoly, there is no telling what the courts might force them to do
But it's not...not even close. Since there are no "barriers to entry" in the search market, anyone in the world is free to "build a better mouse trap", which is exactly what Google did.
Further, keep in mind that google not only got where they are by simply building a better system than anyone else, they also did so while spending absolutely nothing on marketing themselves to the mainstream (while their competiotrs were dumping millions on multimedia marketing blitzes).
Havng said all that, I agree the shine has fallen off google a bit....but it's just a matter of time until a new media "darling" comes along with a better interface and search results. Those of us who've been around long enough remember the excites, altavistas and other "must use" search engines...and their rise was jsut as quick as their fall.
Hell...a little over a year ago, Google dorve 90% of my (free) traffic...that number is now down to less than 50% (and falling by the month, it seems).
Personally, I'd love to see an open-source search, distributed search engine effort put all the commercial engine out of business. Google's "do no evil" mantra has long since been replaced with a "do no evil, unless it is profitable" one.
Do you really think the average user cares about the Google sandbox policy?
They will if they try to start a website business. I know of three different people who were considering opening an online store. They all scrapped the idea after I explained that the only way they are going to get traffic for the first 6 months is through PPC. These were real people selling real products with low margins ($10-$15 a unit) not your standard affiliate website.
Sites aren't good or bad because they are new or old, they are good or bad because they are good or bad, don't make a connection that doesn't exist.
Some of the posters here seem to think sandbox whiners are just corrupt commercial SEO swine.
Well, not true.
The sandbox is not an elegant solution to the problem of search engine spamming. It is a systems kludge, and like all kludges it has the advantage of appearing to work OK, but is not a well-engineered solution at all, and can do as much harm as good. Google should have the brain-power to go beyond such a clumsy approach.
My gripe is that the sandbox has since May trapped one of my sites which is information based, community oriented and only attempting to run on a cost-recovery basis. People can find it everywhere but in Google. Google is the anomaly here.
The sandbox delay doesn't lose me money - that's not the point of the site - but it stops people finding my content (eg when the site or issue gets media coverage) and stops the site being topical and useful in its sector, since unfortunately many Internet users assume Google knows everything.
My other gripe is that the Google webmaster guidelines - which the site respects - imply that all a site requires is that it follow the guidelines and have good content.
The guidelines don't guarantee indexing, sure, but they seem to say - you be straight-forward with us, and we'll be straight-forward with you. The sneaky existence of blunt objects like the sandbox under the counter betrays this expectation.
Talk about stale? MSN's experimental bot was all over my site for weeks, sucking in hundreds of pages - the entire site multiple times. Slurp is a regular too (again, sucking in all my pages multiple times), but those 80 odd pages they show are months old.
The experimental MSN bot is just that, experimental. The production results you see in MSN are based on Inktomi/Yahoo results.
I'm starting to think that the best approach for new sites is build small at first and get a dmoz listing.
slow move-I would say that was an equally slow move to overcome the sand box effect.
My guess is in two thousand years, providing the hairless apes don't make the rubble bounce on this third rock from the sun in a nuclear war by then, Plato will still be well known, and Hurricaine Ivan and Britney Spears long forgotten. Consider Saul of Tarsus. It's been almost two thousand years since he wrote anything, and even today what he authored is selling like hotcakes at the bookstores.
Does not this information based site have links from other sites on the topic? I run an information based site, and just checked the logs. Even though that site is #1 for every SERP that matters on msn.com, I'm getting more traffic from a link on another site on the topic that is near the bottom of the page than from msn.com. Search engines aren't the only source for hits.
The experimental MSN bot is just that, experimental. The production results you see in MSN are based on Inktomi/Yahoo results.
I know of three different people who were considering opening an online store. They all scrapped the idea after I explained that the only way they are going to get traffic for the first 6 months is through PPC.
1. How many business expect an immediate return on investment? They are being short sighted. You need a better sales pitch.
2. If you told an online store that they only way they could get traffic is PPC, then you mislead them. You need to check out Froogle. I ran five online stores that got into Froogle in 2 weeks. Traffic was great with a very high purchase rate.
3. Not sure what they are selling, but a click on Adwords starts at $0.05. I've run campaigns on Adwords that had ROIs of 700%.
Should Google ignore all searches that do not meet the highest academic standards?
Should Google make a shareholder announcement that they are ignoring short-term results for Q4 2004 and 2005 in order to focus on Q4 4004 and 4005?
Are you going to argue that there is a parallel universe where Excite and Altavista and Inktomi did not lose visitors due to stale results?
Anyway, I agree that webmasters have little recourse except to take advantage of one of the loopholes, or focus on other search engines and marketing methods.
The shareholders are the ones with the vested interest.
A Google search is an easy, honest and objective way to find high-quality websites with information relevant to your search.PageRank performs an objective measurement of the importance of web pages by solving an equation of more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Instead of counting direct links, PageRank interprets a link from Page A to Page B as a vote for Page B by Page A. PageRank then assesses a page's importance by the number of votes it receives.
Don't deceive your users ...
The sandbox is not mentioned anywhere in their help or info pages. Being that it is probably now the single most important factor in getting ranked would it not be appropriate for them to point this out? If the sandbox is such a positive thing (as some of you are suggesting) surely they should be happy to tell the world about it?
If Google intend to persevere with this they must come clean and warn people who are submitting sites that it will be 6? 9? or 12? months before they will feature in the results. If they do so I will be perfectly happy to accept it.
People are ditching Google in large numbers today?
>The shareholders are the ones with the vested interest.
Exactly. The shareholders are why any business website has to pay for Adwords for the first 6 months or so if they want to appear in Google at all. At the Googleplex, "greed is good" is the current mantra.
And I agree with BeeDeeDubbleU that it would be nice if Google mentioned its 'sandbox' policy in its guidelines. Why not be open about it, unless they are averse to it highlighting how Google's index may be (a) months behind the times and (b) perhaps significantly in-complete because of it.
I think the Google engineers are smarter then you at figuring how to reduce the spam on the internet.
Spam, what are you talking about? Google can reduce spam on the internet? How is that? You never answered how you feel the sandbox has helped the SERPS become better.
You only care about yourself and the money you make
I hope the Sandbox puts a lot of my competitors and junk websites out of business
Err...you sure you aren't talking about yourself? Or do you want to put your competition out of business for someone elses benefit?
[edited by: mfishy at 12:31 am (utc) on Sep. 13, 2004]
[edited by: rogerd at 2:05 am (utc) on Sep. 13, 2004]
When it comes to business, I've found "sell the sizzle, not the steak" is a profitable strategy. "We're months behind the times, and significantly incomplete" is a marketing strategy so bad I'd sack on the spot the guy in advertising if he suggested it. Google needs to sell the sizzle of the sandbox. "Less spam than the other search engines" would be a good way to do so.
"Less spam than the other search engines" would be a good way to do so.Then why not pick one clean site, return it for every search and proclaim "We are the only spam-free search engine"
Due to my incessant greed I would agree to this if they picked my site.;)
I think the best we can hope for right now is that Google will continue with plans for a Google 2.0 that features a new engine that examines the content on the page:
1) Location on the page: if the content is higher on the page, it has more value.
2) Text nearby links: there have been some studies that show that links mingled with text tend to hold a greater value.
If you look at the work they have been doing in Google Labs you can also see that they are able to make judgements about words you would expect to find that realte to other words. For example, if you have a page about the brand Toyota, there would also be a greater possiblity of seeing words like tires, car, and engine.
This I believe to be the root of the new technology:
1) Word association
2) Proximity
Meanwhile, I guess all we can do is argue about the value of the Sandbox Effect and speculate about what is to come.
That's exactly what I did with the site of mine that is now stuck in the sandbox. Bought an existing domain that never had a site on it AFAIK, after it had lapsed, then built a new site on it.
(OK we are now back on topic. I'll introduce a new topic about Google's failure to tell the public about the sandbox.)
Newly Purchased Domains = Old and Busted
Old Domains, not deleted with links = New Hotness
