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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?
The way I see it, is that for a competitive search term, a page (or site) has to acheive a certain score to be considered. How the score is acheived is the key - number of links, age of links, on-site factors and so on.
I also think the value of the age of a link depends on the age of the search term. By which I mean if a search term has been around since the dawn of google, then a new, say 1 month old, link for that search term has minimal value. Whereas a comparatively new term, say "Widgets 2004" is much easier to rank for.
If you see what I mean.
I just don't believe that all new sites are shovelled off to some holding area. There is too much evidence to the contrary. Having said that, something is causing new pages / sites difficulty in ranking for competitive search terms. Non-competitive is easy.
Why does it exist?
No idea.
I think Google simply raised the bar in the algo on the number of a.) local AND b.) expert documents required to link to you. Without focusing on this specifically, people simply do not get into the initial ranking group where then the subsequent re-ranking pays more attention to content.
I should have moved up slowly, not have jumped to the top from nowhere.
I should have moved up slowly, not have jumped to the top from nowhere.
Not if ranking is a two stage process.
1) Establish the top set of N sites.
2) Rank the top set of N sites.
In March of this year that known entity changed. This thing exists, and if you have found a way around it you are in the extreme minority and should count your blessings, and pat yourself on the back.
For the rest of the SEO world, and the great majority, the change has appeared, and it is quite consistent. The reason this is such a good thread is because the man is posing the question; “WHY”
Why will a new site be crawled, indexed, and appear in the results correctly for obscure terms, but not for the significant key words you designed the site for in the first place?
Is it accidental or purposeful? To me that’s where to start.
It behaves as if there is a threshold based on the competitiveness of the search term.
For example, I have a 6 month old site called
"www.brandname-competitive-term.co.uk".
It ranks as follows
brandname - #1
brandname competitive term - #30 (+/- 10)
competitive term - #350 (+/- 50)
This hasn't really changed for 4-5 months. New links are added and older links age. I think once the (number of links x age of links x link quality x unknown factor) hits the threshold, I'm in.
So, anyway, I think the start point is to forget about a sandbox as a concept.
It's just harder to rank these days.
thank you, leveldisc, exactly what i was saying
Sorry, didn't mean to plagarise!
I just don't believe that all new sites are shovelled off to some holding area.
Nothing's being shoveled off anywhere. The "Google Lag" is a side effect of an algorithmic evaluation.
Remember, these sites are still in the index - they're just not ranking.
