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I have been posting in favour of the Sandbox's existence and I have 2 sites firmly stuck in the sand!
However...
2 weeks ago I registered a brand new domain and started to build a new site. I knew it would be at least 6 months before anything happened but..
This morning it entered the index for the first time - straight on page one for a one word search (a town, granted only 194,000 matches) but none the less the last 2 sites still cannot achieve similar results after 6 months.
Also preliminary early pages ranking very well
The site has only one incoming link, no adsense, banners or anything, vanilla html etc.
Built as per my last 2 sites so clearly something has changed!
Regards and hope to all
Rod
Yes, I have managed to rank many new pages in highly seo'd fields.
The secret is: slowing acquiring one way links over a period of time. Also, a small recip link trading schedule has been established...etc etc etc
JuniorOptimizer, why do you need to do all this if there is no sandbox? Surely you don't employ these techniques for older established sites!
And of course it is new domains/websites, rather than "new pages", that are sandboxed for money terms.
Yes, I have managed to rank many new pages in highly seo'd fields.
The secret is: slowing acquiring one way links over a period of time. Also, a small recip link trading schedule has been established...etc etc etc
All ground breaking stuff, eh?
[google.com...]
It doesn’t anymore, and it should. That’s the problem with this thing.
I view the problem as not being me or google, but all those stupid Rhode Island widget dealers who do not come list in my directory.
I just launched a site this month...brand new domain name, clean HTML, nothing spammy, quality content, yadda yadda. Time to start counting the days I guess.
An interesting note: I have a blog that I post in regularly. It's not something I try to get ranked under any phrases, it's just something to do when I'm bored or feel like writing. The content, if I wanted to market it, would be highly competitive however. Anyways...to experiment I added an three word phrase to the blog title and wrote a short, nonsense post using said keyword twice. One week later it's number one in google for that three word phrase.
The blog itself is about three months old - it has no incoming links.
Right now I see google as the bully of search engines and I'm tired of it.
No answer there suggests niche terms. I am currently placing top 10 for niche terms in a sandboxed site, those results come in a normal time frame after I add that content, 1-2 weeks. It looks to me like the sandbox is not applying to terms with less than 100,000 results returned. Has anyone seen anything different, or can anyone pinpoint an upper limit for serps returned for keyword phrase x or y?
That's for a brand new, no 301 domain; new pages on a 301 domain seem to be treated differently than the old pages from what I can see. Has anyone seen any patterns in how new pages are treated in a brand new domain?
-added: oh, I rechecked, my highest search term returns #5 out of 250,000 serps. That's on a page added after site is sandboxed. This domain has a 301 from an old domain, so it's not a perfect example of the sandbox. All its older pages, existing before the sandbox, and the search terms they targetted, successfully, are in the sandbox as far as I can tell.
To some degree yes, I've seen them catch over-optimization, which is not a bad thing. But for the rest, I'm not talking about blocking spam here, I'm talking about what is increasingly starting to look like a fundamental breakdown. Blocking almost all new sites from the web for this long is a breakdown. This isn't 'getting better at detecting seo techniques', it's blocking all new sites, that's like getting better at driving by turning off the car and parking it in the driveway. If they were getting better, then spammy sites wouldn't get in, but real sites would. And I wouldn't be seeing directories in top 3 positions more often than not...
What Microsoft wouldn't pay to get the kind of loving treatment google gets from even the people it's hurting, how do they keep doing it? Is it the cute company name? Is it the company slogan?
One of my sites used to appear on page 1 with other relevant sites for certain key phrases. Now it seems there are a couple of these sites per page of SERPs mixed in with wildly off-topic sites.
This might not be the case in all sectors, but there's lots of 'noise' breaking up the good results of days gone by.
Can someone tell me how to check if my site is in the sandbox?Is the domain name new. If so, the answer is yes.
Not quite, is the domain name new, are you targetting competitive keywords? Then the answer is yes. What would be interesting is if everyone here pooled together what they see to determine how many serp results constitute a competitive keyword. 100,000, 200,000? What's the highest count anyone has seen rank consistently with a new sandboxed site they've put up?
New sites targetting niche terms, non-competetive terms, don't seem to have any particular sandbox affect, which is also revealing I think.
figment88, I take your point - and it's not your fault google choose to list you at number one.
But "all those stupid Rhode Island widget dealers" couldn't possibly list in your directory and the zillion and one other directories now out there.
They could and do appear in Google however - but on page 142 of returned results despite providing far more relevant information than your directory with no listings.
If I search Google for results I don't expect to be directed to a directory / minor search engine with no relevant results. And yet this happens time after time.
Not quite, is the domain name new, are you targetting competitive keywords? Then the answer is yes.
2by4 I am not sure that this is correct. A couple of months ago I did a non-commercial site for a lawn bowling club (I think I am OK to say this? It's not a commercial organisation.)
I don't think we would put lawn bowling in the competitive arena and a search for "lawn bowling location" Google yields only 50,500 results. My site appears in position 228. The same search on Google UK yields only 7,380 results and my site is in position 53. To me this would indicate that it is sandboxed even though it is non-commercial and it targets non competitive keywords. If I do a search for the actual club name, "widget1 stopword widget2 bowling club", miracle of miracles, it appears in position 3 with results from an obscure directory holding the top two positions.
What I am saying is that I don't think the sandbox is smart enough to filter at the level you suggest.
Can someone tell me how to check if my site is in the sandbox? Thanks.
The method I use is to check out the relationship for an allinanchor search and the standard search.
In the areas I check to results are very similar, sometimes almost identical. Whatever the results you'll get a feel as to where your site should roughly be for a given term.
If you're there great if you are disproportionately further away for a new site then (presuming no other penalties) you are sandboxed
Regards
Rod
i'm afraid that you cannot conclude this. the returned number results from the second search which includes the secondary (sandbox) index. so the threshold with just the main index is still hidden.
I have no idea what fields you guys are competing in, but the ones I work on are 25 million plus.
Almost all the incoming links are on seperate class C IP addresses and total over 1,000. No sitewides or anything crazy like that. The domain was registered in March.
One day someone on WebmasterWorld announced the "sandbox is over" and I checked and the site was sitting there in 2nd place. It hasn't budged since.
If you can guess the phrase I'm talking about you can hit Google and confirm what I'm saying. But I don't plan on getting anymore specific because I don't need the competition.
I guarantee you many people here have ranked sites that are registered since March, they just don't see any need to tout it.
I will agree that it's a lot easier to rank an older domain, and I suggest doing that. If you absolutely have to rank now, get an old domain and go to town. Hopefully I haven't insulted anyone with this post and this should serve as some inspiration to anyone who's still afraid of "Old Nessie".
How long did this process take? From first linking to new domain name to #2? Given a natural link development with 1000 links, that would have to be at least a few months, no?
The separate IP addresses is a no brainer, it never fails to amaze me when people use those cheesy virtual hosting companies that put all the sites on one IP.
"2by4 I am not sure that this is correct. A couple of months ago I did a non-commercial site for a lawn bowling club"
The non-sandboxed terms were much less than 50000 for the site I'm referring to. We might be able to figure out the actual cutoff for that, for a 5000 return keyword phrase, 2 words, it went to number one and stayed there, no big achievement but it didn't get sandboxed.
What I'm interested in is seeing if we can find the actual cutoff numbers, the numbers I put out there are just rough guesses, does anyone else see different numbers?
By the way, I've never had a doubt that the sandbox filters can themselves be manipulated, it's just a question of how to do that.
"the returned number results from the second search which includes the secondary (sandbox) index. so the threshold with just the main index is still hidden. "
Good point, thanks for reminding me of that.
[edited by: 2by4 at 6:15 pm (utc) on Dec. 10, 2004]
One.
I've seen the sandbox effect for as few as six results. Less competition and less numbers just make everything easier always.
There is no question that a large number of sandboxed sites were let in during May.
I agree with this 100%.
I had a site come out of the sandbox at that time and it is still out of the sandbox. I also have a few sites launched after that time that are still in the sandbox.
There are some people that say there is a special way of getting sites out of the sandbox - I do not agree with this. As I said, I did have a site come out of the sandbox and can say that there was nothing special or different that I did to that site as opposed to sites that are still sandboxed.
The links have effect as we rank very high for allinanchor, and for the rest of the commands. Without any credit for these links I wonder how that can happen, (perhaps someone knows?)
These sites have had links, from old sites with good PR, for going on 10 months. How much “age” do you need?
Nothing fantastic I know and we'll see how long it lasts.
Inidentally, site launched in April has been top three since it almost began for 1,170,000 result search term.
So Sandbox cut off - if it exists - cannot be set in stone.
that's the new site boost, don't get too excited. I got that boost too, it was very funny, I was beating a huge software company just because we shared part of our name, took me a while to figure out where the traffic came from, once the new site boost faded after 2 weeks I never got those serps back, even after about 9-10 months, nor should I have.
It sounds just possible that your site launched in april may have just squeaked in under the may cleaning people are reporting.
I'm curious to see if anyone has gotten a site launched this summer out of the sandbox for serps > 500,000 - 1,000,000. And if so, how long that took. Junioroptimizer seems to have done this. What was the launch date? When did you start getting your top 10 for your competitive phrases?
I got a #1 for a 4 word phrase that has 1.4 million. I don't get any traffic from it though.
Honestly, I dont think search results have anything to do with it. Search volume does.
The one main factor they all had in common was they all had links to other pages with the keyword in the anchor text.
The other main factor they all had was the keyword was in their anchor text in incoming links to that page. No-Brainer.
Not all of them had the keyword in their title. But most did. So it looks like the title isn't that important.
The search I did had 146,000,000 results. The page rank didn't seem to make much difference in the ranking. Below is the order of page rank.
1.PR6
2.PR7
3.Pr8
4.pr5
5.pr7
6.pr6
7.pr6
8.pr5
9.pr7
10.PR6
It looks like google is only counting the page rank of the links pointing to the page rather than counting the actual page rank of the page itself. That explains why a PR5 can rank higher than a PR7.
I think google is devaluing basic SEO and maybe sandboxing it? It looks like text only is working better than before.
Plus anchor text in outgoing links from the page is helping too. So if your page is about widgets then you should have links to internal or external pages about "widgets" and "blue widgets" and "red widgets" etc...
Theme pages are ranking well.
I have built a new site based on this and I will let you know if it get's sandboxed or not.
I'm getting REAL frustrated with this. Look, all I want is for my site to be in Google's serps so people can see my hard work. What's so bad about that? If anything, Google should dump 90% of their serps because most of them haven't been updated since the mid-90s!
This is unfair. I know the SEO world does not play a fair game, but what about those of us who do not want to do the PPC thing?
Argh!
You won't feel frustrated if you accept that this is a main index capacity problem. Google is working hard to solve the problem. Unfortunately it is proving very difficult. If you accept this, then the situation is only temporary - a long temporary - situation.
By the way, the sandbox has been extended to new pages on old sites. When Google announced their index to have been expanded to 8B, most of the added pages of old sites do not appear in the main index. And they exhibit the sandbox symptoms!
In the meantime, I suggest you concentrate on Yahoo/MSN and Google will come when Google comes!
