Sandboxed Sites - Back Together?

Do they come out together or one by one?

[McMohan]

Most of the new sites that I work with are still in the sandbox. Was just curios to know, if all the sanboxed sites come out of the sandbox during one fine major updation or one by one, over the rolling updates?

That is to say, should one be checking to see if the sites are out of the sandbox regularly or only when they know there is a major Google update? :)

Thanks

Mc

[dvduval]

If Google wanted to totally destroy the "shock and awe" of the rollout of MSNs new search, the would remove the sandbox effect right after the MSN search is released. ;)

[MHes]

>Don't get too comfortable.

... don't take me too seriously. I worked out the other day that absolutely everything I have done this year has had no effect what so ever! Not a single new site is doing well, and the only redeming fact is niether have my competitors done anything. I could have been on holiday all year and still be in the same position. We have about 5 sites that rock, we never touch them incase we ruin them!

The truth about sandbox is there is nothing you can do. People who say otherwise have found a niche phrase with which they got lucky. But we are talking about having a site ranking for hundreds of phrases in the top 10 and pulling 10,000+ people per day. That just does not happen now.

The only thing you can do is make a good site and wait. When the natural links start happenning, things will look up. However, google is like a 4 barrell lock. You have to have all 4 elements in place to open it. If you miss one, your not in.

1) Natural links
2) optimised pages
3) pr flow
4) Original and quality content

Natural links take a long time, you can't fake it. The spammy sites are still hanging in there but without attracting new links then others will catch up and slowly replace them. As I said before, google is playing a long game, they are not going to replace spam with newer spam. Buying old domains may get you past the sandbox, but you still need quality links in to rank well. In 5 years time google will have an index with only older sites in the top positions and these will all have high quality natural links. You can't rank every site in the top ten, so just rank proven quality.

Google is based on links which are votes. It needs to isolate the real votes from the link exchanges etc. A real vote is one from a quality site that also has real votes and can be trusted. The process of evaluating all this takes a long time and if google is going to do it, now is the time.

No new site can be trusted, thats the long and short of it. It has to earn its position with real votes that are evaluated over a long time. Google was obsessed with 'freshness' and they got stung. I reckon they have decided that google news and froogle reduces the need for them to list new sites right away. The option of adwords is there, the rest of the index is for proven quality only.

Its a pain but quality will win through in the end. Meanwhile, spam the hell out of other engines, they haven't been so bold. :)

[phantombookman]

The purpose of a sandbox can only be one thing - to reduce the prevalence of fly-by-night throw-away domains and link schemes used by so many spammers. But those with quality sites to offer will be willing to wait it out.

Exactly!

I do not understand the continued capacity argument.

[JuniorOptimizer]

Is it really so hard to believe that these new sites need to "earn" their rankings.

Just because you make a website does not by default mean you get high rankings in Google.

All anyone is saying is "despite my attempts to manipulate Google using methods that work with my old domains" I can't get anywhere because of the "sandbox".

Do most people normally rank in the top 10 for highly competitive phrases within a month. I think not.

[airpal]

The capacity argument can be proven if someone with an old site added thousands of unique new pages, which have trouble getting ranked for any terms. I believe there were a few examples of this in some other threads, but I can't specifically recall them.

If Google is fighting SERP spam by not ranking any new sites for over 6 months, the spammers have won. With hundreds of PHDs/programmers on staff, something tells me they would be able to come up with a stronger response than... "lets not let any sites in the past half year or more rank for any keywords."

Do most people normally rank in the top 10 for highly competitive phrases within a month. I think not.

The waiting period is now up to 10 months for some. And there are a quite a few members on this forum which I know for a fact can destroy the competition for most keywords/phrases they go after. I feel sympathy for the older sites that are going to be blown out of the top SERPS when the new ultra-optimized sites are finally let through.

[dazzlindonna]

If Google wanted to totally destroy the "shock and awe" of the rollout of MSNs new search, the would remove the sandbox effect right after the MSN search is released.

Very good point, dvduval, and it would be exactly Google's M.O. to do that.

[walkman]

"If Google wanted to totally destroy the "shock and awe" of the rollout of MSNs new search, the would remove the sandbox effect right after the MSN search is released."

Nah, they'll resurrect pages that were active 4-5 years ago, put them in the supplementals and claim that they now have 16 billion pages.

[brixton]

"I feel sympathy for the older sites that are going to be blown out of the top SERPS when the new ultra-optimized sites are finally let through. "
.....and who told you that the owners of those old sites they don't have already made ,published and indexed in G and many other SE's new ultra-optimized sites with tones of quality links high PR and just waiting in the "sandbox" patiently.Do you really think that those old webmasters are so naive? like all the newbies have done their new ultra-optimized sites they have done the same plus with more experience even (hypothetically) the old sites will give place for new sites I bet you the new sites on the top ten will be the sites of those grumpy old men again :).

[goodbass]

On the topic of this sandbox effect possibly being software/capacity related, might this be something:

This is G o o g l e's cache of [joellabasses.com...] as retrieved on Dec 31, 1969 23:59:59 GMT

I could swear that I brought this site online only four months ago, but apparently I have been at it for 35 years (and I'm still in the sandbox).

[airpal]

.....and who told you that the owners of those old sites they don't have already made ,published and indexed in G and many other SE's new ultra-optimized sites with tones of quality links high PR and just waiting in the "sandbox" patiently.

Their attitude of being happy for the side effect that the sandbox is, because they were lucky enough to escape it... tells me everything I need to know. Those who rank well now and are working to rank well in the future, would not mock new sites as having no value.

[bak70]

I jut had a site hit number 3 in google.
Out of over 7 million results.
Heres the kicker.
I made 6 more sites at the same time going after widget accessories differentwidget accessories and so on.
I have promoted all the sites the same way.
I registered all the sites at the same time as well.
This tells me if there is a sandbox (im still not convinced) sites will be added at different times not all at once.
I do hope this is the beginning of a good month though.

I still believe that the more competition in the serps for the particular keyword the longer it will take to get to page one.(i guess you could call this the sandbox)

I used to get to page one in three months.
Now that there is more competition for all keywords you start off deeper in the google index so it takes longer to get to the front.

Some of us should be happy we show up at all.
For mortgage there is 100 million pages in the index.
Google only shows 857 results.
If I built a mortgage site and showed up in the 857 pages I would think thats a pretty good start.
beating out 90 million other pages is not all that bad.
I wouldnt expect much movement without tons of seo over the course of years.

[bak70]

hey goodbass
Your site doesnt even have page rank yet.
Its not a good example of the so called sandbox.
When it has page rank for 6 months and doesnt show up then you can use it as an example.

[bak70]

Walkman thats pretty funny.
But come on if a search engine has 16 billion pages it must be better.
lol

I know whenever i need info I always go at least a couple of thousand pages deep.
Not!

[walkman]

major google crawling...95% of it are the pages with just a URL. In my case those pages shouldn't exist not even as URLs anyway. They only way they ended up there is because they didn't obey the robots.txt.

[randle]

I know everyone’s situation is different but we find the sandbox quite real and very compelling. For the main key word we optimized a site for starting back in March we presently stand using the following commands;

Allintitle: # 16 out of 422,000 results returned
Allinanchor: # 12 out of 20,200 results returned
Allintext: #18 out of 3,560,000 results returned

For the main key word searched, we are not in the top 1,000 out of 3,570,000 results returned.

The site has been up since March and has a PR of 4.

That’s the sandbox, and after almost 9 months its getting a little frustrating! The only theory we are working right now is there must be a certain amount of on theme links.

Anyone have thoughts pro or con on that? Minimum amount of on theme links or in the box you go?