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I feel very strongly that until we have a good grasp on why it exists, it will be very hard to beat.
I don't buy the explanation that it's intended to be a method of stopping spam. Why? One, there's too much collateral damage it is doing. Two, if you accept the 80/20 principle (20% of spammers are doing 80% of the spamming), and you realize that there are multiple ways already of beating the sandbox that all of those spammers are aware of, it doesn't make sense anymore.
So, why does the sandbox exist?
The most obvious effect of the sandbox is that it prevents new domains (not pages) from ranking for any relatively competitive term. So, start thinking like a search engine - what would be the benefit of this?
I beg to differ. I've seen only a very few *new* spam sites, and we work in a lot of competitive categories.
Does anyone here think that G was doing a good job of controlling spam before? Not me. This knocked out the single largest short term threat to G's future quality...not a small thing with an IPO and attendant scrutiny on the horizon.
And why assume that G is done? IMHO we're simply witnessing an evolution:
Act One
Florida
Acts Two, Three and Four
Florida Tweaks and Testing (Austin, Esmeralda, etc.)
Act Five
Feb 04 Florida Tweaks (Sandbox 1.0)
Act Six
May 04 Florida Tweaks (Sandbox 2.0 - standards toughen and/or the lag gets longer)
Act Seven
Sept 04 Florida Tweaks (goodbye feed sites)
Acts Eight-?
TBD
Final Act
New algo that hammers loads more existing/old aff sites.
The Supplemental Index, the URL-only listings, and the sandbox are happening on the front end, someplace after the crawl but before the old-style, normal indexing.
I can believe that Florida was intended to fight spam. I also believe that Google sold more ads during Florida, and liked what they saw. But it was starting to attract adverse publicity at a certain point, so they turned back the knob on Florida.
This latest thing looks like a different problem. I don't think there's a knob this time. Remember how quickly the knob was turned back last December? It only took about a week or two.
This time it looks like Google has lost the knob option. It's hard to believe that Google would do something this dangerous to their reputation right now. Sure, after the lockups expire and everyone is rich, anything goes. But this is a very critical time for the stock price. Next month, and the four months following, lots of lockups expire. If the stock price drops even 50 percent, back to where it started on day one, then this 50 percent represents a lot of money for a lot of Googlers.
There might be something major in the works, but even rolling out that will only make half of all webmasters happy, and the other half furious. Very risky. It's also risky to just let things deteriorate for a few more months, but it may be that Google sees this is the best, or even the only, alternative.
I do not and have not seen aff sites effected any more than any other type of site. Nearly all content sites are supported by ads so it really would not help them anyway. Also, they currently run the biggest aff network in the world...adsense...
Maybe we give the boys at G a bit too much credit for what they can and cannot do?
Right up until March 2004, that is. As of today the last 8 months worth of new information, which is the most important kind of information, is most definitely not universally accessible in this index.
I don’t know, I just find it hard to accept this is all part of a master plan; just leaving out the last 8 months.
Let's be clear. If you're referring to 'sandboxed sites' then yes agreed. This thing keeps most new sites suppressed, aff and otherwise.
But, remember that in the months prior to Feb 04, the majority of new sites that quickly performed well in the SERP's were SEO'd commercial sites. Your basic new amateur hobby site did not jump to the top of the SERP's in its second week of existence the way new aff and other commercial sites so often did.
Plus, CNN ain't havin' trouble getting their new pages indexed. So what is the big deal (from G's POV)? The only people screaming about this are in here. G has gone on record time and again, in a variety of not very subtle ways, with comments that confirm their bias is towards info sites and not commercial sites. Commercial sites are for Adwords.
This is part of a long term, systematic assault on commercial sites, and aff sites tend to be lightening rods in this environment.
Whether or not this is a byproduct, or direct result, or algo, or filter, or front end, or backend, or all of none of the above, I'm not clever enough to know. What I do know is generally what sort of site G still seems to favor, and having found that out, it becomes a bit clearer what is going on. G is searching for ways, both blunt and elegant, to remove more and more commercial sites from the SERP's...in a lot of areas of the Web.
This sandbox is a side effect of Florida. Obviously, SEOs did not (and COULD not) recognize it's existence until several months after Florida (January or February perhaps?). So trying to isolate it and trying to identify a "cause and effect" is short sighted and overly simplistic. Sandbox is simply one factor of Google's new algo.Google used to use incoming links and an ODP listing as their primary measure of a site's quality. Obviously they have revised that criteria with Florida and our task is to identify the new criteria and take advantage of them.
Right on, AFAIC, with the linking quality standards, et al, modified from what they were before.
That is exactly why sites hit during Florida exhibit the *identical* symptoms as so-called "sandboxed" sites, except that they've been around for long enough to show toolbar PR. Sites that got hit lacked the very things it more than likely takes to get around and avoid the "Google Lag" at this point in time.
And no, sorry dear - no one will be foolish enough show anything to meet a "challenge" in order to disprove a fallacious theory of some sort.
the challenge was for him to demonstrate his statement "easy to get around the sandbox". if you think this is related with my theory, then you're thinking with your behind. but then, of course, us girls have a right to think with our behind.
Interesting, I recently noticed a very weird sequence of results that seem to go with this suggestion;
While doing some real hardware geek type stuff I needed to get the jumper settings for harddrives,
A search for manufacturer model number jumper settings
did not give me the manufactor site, but a bunch of sites that mentioned this but did not have the answer. I finally gave up googling it and just went to the manuracturor sites to ge the info, or I used Yahoo, can't remember which, but this was a significant total failure to retrieve information that exists essentially only on the manufactorer website. This is what I would call tightening ti too far, it's irrelevant why this happens, this is something that users are going to start noticing, they are noticing it, I'm seeing small changes on average, more yahoo searches coming in than ever before. And remember, 30% or so of google stats belong to AOL if I have those numbers right, maybe 25%.
In my areas, almost all spam sites are new. There are very few of the "old spam".
If I was to just judge from the hyper-money areas I deal with: lag time only effects things in the top 80% of pages if they were ranked purely via a legitimate/clean/quality criteria. Sites that are primarily one single doorway page are the spam du jour, if they were created recently. Older pages like this are dead. New sites built on low quality algo ingredients do just fine, while old ones don't. New sites built on the quality algo components blow chunks, while old ones do fine.
Lag time is here not to frustrate seos, since it is easy to get around if you want to build sites that are intended to have a six month half-life.
But what else has Google done recently? The idiotbacklink data, and no tolbar PR update. What do these have in common? They are two things that don't confuse more experienced seos at all, but befuddle the less experienced types. I don't know why Google keeps making such $$$$$$$$$ presents to seos who have a solid grasp of things (and I don't mean "great" here, just "solid"), but that seems to be the reality.
If we don't have a PR update by the morning of the 11th, meaning they could still conceivably be now seen as adopting a quarterly schedule, then I don't see how any reasons really matter here. Google has either had either a massive failure in its data and/or will be unveiling a search database and algorithm completely different than what we see today.
