Why does the 'Google Lag' exist?

Trying to understand its purpose.

[bakedjake]

I had some in-depth discussion this weekend with some friends about the sandbox. Every theory on how to beat it kept coming back to one central problem - no one is sure why it exists.

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?

[steve128]

>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.<

So please explain how can g tell the difference between "quality" and "rubbish" according to PR?
not to mention if they are paying (ok some make it obvious)

jeez, nassa cut.. that new link to me please -;
Maybe g checks out all links to "rubbish sites"
I don't think so!
Take a look at all "big sites" most provide links to "rubbish sites"

[steveb]

"So please explain how can g tell the difference between "quality" and "rubbish" according to PR?"

That is the business Google is in!

[agerhart]

So please explain how can g tell the difference between "quality" and "rubbish"

They can't.

[Vadim]

What if the Google just began to update the index and PR continuously and not once in n-th month?

It’s by the way explains why there are no major PR update. It may be no more major PR update in future. However individual PR will be updated.

Then Google can get reliable results for new sites only after some time, needed to crawl all sites in the Internet. If the new site happen to get too much inbound link at the start, Google sandboxes it until it has the whole picture.

It also explains why the new sites often initially get some PR. If their PR is not deviate significantly from the average PR in the Internet, this PR may stay. If it deviates, it is sandboxed until Google gets the whole picture.

Vadim.

[duckxtales]

What is this so called sandbox? im a noob... teach me.. =P

thx

[skipfactor]

>>lag time was created in part to help stabalize the serps pre-ipo

I've heard this mentioned by some, but I don't get it. I'm clueless on stocks, but would one really use the current/then SERPs as part of a buy decision? If I were an interested buyer, I'd want to see the company act as it always had: "Stabilize...you mean Google was 'unstable' before?". Would Google really throw a wrench into a smooth system that's already a sure bet as an IPO?

It also seems this type of deliberate action would lead them to the slippery slope of potential SEC violations--stabilize the SERPs right before a split or shareholder's meeting? I can't see it.

[isitreal]

it might be evidence that Google is no longer exclusively looking at the web as a bunch of pages, but as pages that belong to sites.

Interesting posts scarecrow, thanks.

I'm not sure if this fits with what you're suggesting, I changed domain names 2.5 months ago on a well established site, growing fast, decided to switch before it got bigger and suffer now rather than later.

301'ed old site to new site, all old content deep in sandbox re SERPs, however most new pages and content I'm adding are not in sandbox, but rank fine for their specialized terms, about the same as anything I put in before I switched domain names. Two possiblities that I can see:
If new content is not sandboxed and old content is, google is comparing the old site to the new site somehow, and letting in the new stuff but keeping out the old.

or

it's just the original pages that are sandboxed? But that doesn't fit with what many people are reporting, full sitewide sandbox on a new domain name, all pages.

very confusing.

But it's hard to see how that would happen on only old pages and not new ones without some reference to the site as a whole if a sitewide sandbox exists, which it doesn't seem to in my case, in other words, google is differentiating between the group of old urls and the new urls despite the alleged sitewide sandbox affect. Many of the 'old' urls have been extensively rewritten during this time, but still are buried, so it's not the content per se of the pages.

<added>another oddity: after 2.5 months, doing an site:olddomain.com which has been gone, 301, now for that whole time, reveals 3 pages, very old, 2 haven't been physically present on the site for about 10 months, from a section of the site I took down, but which is still linked to I guess.

[DaveN]

Jake, how come then a site registered three weeks ago is ranking and it's not a DaveN Special, it totally missed the sandbox, penaltybox or googleslag or whatever you wnat to call it, I like GOOGLESLAG hehehe but don't know her personally ;)

check your sticky ;)

DaveN

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

There is so much speculation about why it exists. Perhaps it's just that Google is broke in some way?

Lets all start calling it the GOOGLE FLAW. We'll try to make this the industry name for this. The press will eventually pick it up and Google will be forced to come clean. :)

[nuevojefe]

(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.)

If that's the case then it's probably because as someone had said there is (may be) a lock time in which certain people cannot sell their shares.