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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?
Let's focus on the topic I've posted.
Please start a new thread if you'd like to discuss other things not pertinent to why the sandbox may exist, such as performance of sites now out, or the name of the phenomenon which is unimportant.
As agerhart and Marcia mentioned, it is NOT a penality, and I'll get the title changed. Thanks.
"Most webmasters don't have a commercial interest. They do it for fun and to help other people, not for money."
This is the one of the most infantile and silly posts I've ever seen.Webmasters get into sites because it IS fun. And challenging. But the truth is, to develop a superior info site, one that, ultimately reaches many people and serves a ton of useful information------YOU HAVE TO BE SEEN IN SERPS. And that involves hard work aka seo. There's nothing wrong with it.
Hi ownerrim
True. but there is a line which if you cross is akin to spamming. Which if you cross just does not make your argument of interest in the website perse true. It would just amount to interest in money. I have nothin against money or building up a site of 10K pages from scratch in a day and putting it up.
But stilll dont you think there is a difference beween the 10K in 1 day site and 10K in one year site. Gaming is for short term. As in not 2-3 months. But maybe a year or a two before someone does a oneup or maybe you just run out of ideas or the game is changed (dont kid yourself that you will always be the best in all games). But when you build a site for the long term you can be rest assured that the time you take to play golf now if you were spamming will be repaid back in the future. There are 2 kinds of people. the nomads who can live and adapt and i mean live well. thats a gift. they are what we call spammers now.
the other kind are the settlers who will settle in with a plan for the future willing to build something that will benefit a few people apart from themselves and last for longer.
I prefer the second (i have nothing against the first, no i am not saying coz i am admist a pack of them) as i believe that it is the settlers who are the reason that so many oppurtunities for others (including you nomads) exist.
one side effect is that we do get a little round and soft as time goes on when the nomads are lean and mean always. Result? change hurts the settlers the most. But no change is ever brought about by a nomad. Its always another settler with another idea.
Well i guess i can start wearing my metal hat waiting for the stones.
There lies the prob
How do you get trapped in the sb, some existing sites of mine, no problem indexed and perform ok in good old fashioned google style. But new sites, going back 6-months in some cases well and truely quicksanded.
Around 5/6 months ago our webhost decided to do shutdown, closed the door and made off with a bunch of money ( not only me many others, it was big news at the time) besides the point..anyhow by the time I could set up new account, transfer domains etc etc about two-weeks elapsed, loads of 404's. At the time I was doing ok to very good in g. Now, these sites near to nothing in g. Other sites hosted with another company not affected.
So it seems to me, although the sites I moved are not new it seems to g they are.
I must admit this sb only drew my attention a month or so ago, cos I couldn't understand how I lost so many places. Sods law, the best sites for income were hosted with the guys who did a runner.
No sob story, I'm optimistic and remain so. But I do realise the difficulty in trying to explain to biz owners, some guys think a "scam" and in reality how can you blame them.
My own theory;
Not many have mentioned a "link sb" rather than a site sandbox.
I believe the sb is related to incoming links.
An existing established site seems to be uneffected, add a new page no problem, provide from existing site, site/map index page blah.. links, indexed and ranked within days. no prob ( at least in my experience
)The only drawback is the content must be related, imho g is good at that now, otherwise the spammers would be in heaven)
However, make a new site different ball game.
As an example, I made a new site (ok completely off topic) with thousands of links, existing pr7-to pr3) maybe? who knows pr now. The site ranks nowhere, after 4 months
keyword anchor text incomming seems to be ignored, for new sites hopefully this may mean an end to guest book spammers.
At this time g does recognise guest book spamming as ligit, I think things will change and hopefully quickly
related sites queries show that Google often groups sites together that have links from multiple, unrelated sites pointing to all of them.
Example: I run a site about widgets. A webmaster halfway around the world runs a site about naked cows.
We each go out and get links from well known web directories. 2000 of them, let's say. And pretend they're one page directories with a bunch of links on them.
Visualize: directoryApage points to widgets and naked cows. directoryBpage points to widgets and naked cows. directoryCpage points to widgets and naked cows. Wash, rinse, repeat 2000 times.
Suddenly, Google thinks our sites are related, just because we appear on so many pages together.
What if the "Google Lag" is not evaluating attributes of individual sites, rather, the evaluation is happening on "groups" of multiple links?
Most SEOers here are reporting problems with the "Google Lag". Most SEOers here are getting links from the same sites/pages, using the same linkdev techniques.
Why would they do this? If they did, think about how easy it might be to categorize sites, without the need for a human edited directory.
Why would it be happening on just new sites?
Term Sandbox >> [webmasterworld.com...] Message 12 & 14
At the same time, new sites that seem to systematically not get hit are ones that spam blogs and guestbooks. These new "sites" rank very good right away (with their white bars revealing they are post June 1 sites).
What can we conclude/guess about that? Well obviously this spamming blogs gets you tons of links from all sorts of IPs/domains/hosts/etc. So volume of links from unrelated *low-quality* sites makes you (at least far more likely to) avoid lag time. But volume of links from high a small amount of quality domains doesn't (and of course a few links from low quality domains doesn't either). And then, it is near impossible to get volume of links from 1000+ high quality topical domains, so it is hard compare the effect of of this sort of great/diverse linking to the blog spamming link volume.
One oversimplified conclusion though would be: something new achieves a PR5+, goes into lag time. This would explain why the new sites ranking well are those that have thousands of anchor text links, but those links only make the page PR4 or less.
I don't think that is right either though, as sites avoiding lag time include those that blog spam but also buy highish PR links.
Still, I lean toward thinking lag time exists to combat "fake quality", that is, sites buying high quality links to pretend to be of quality. If that is part of the reason, obviously Google hasn't just thrown the baby out with the bathwater, they have launched it with a howitzer.
(I'll also say that I am pretty sure lag time was created in part to help stabalize the serps pre-ipo. Why it contunies to exist is more puzzling.)
