Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
If your site is less than a year old you are likely sandboxed.
I can't believe most sites under a year's age are in some sort of penalty box. Google would be useless. So, I want to know:
1. Are all sites sandboxed, or do certain traits (like affiliate links, low content) trigger it?
2. How long does it last?
3. How variable is the duration?
4. How do you know your site is being sandboxed?
5. Does the effect taper off or is it a binary thing?
6. What gets you out of the sandbox? Is it merely time or do good links or whatever speed it up?
Thanks.
Maybe the Earth is round.
TaylorAtCTS, I would be interested in the 16* results on both Yahoo and Google. It is now in the middle of the night here and I just don't have the energy to do this comparison myself now.
I tried the keyword x16 and it works for my sandboxed site..
its crazy.. i never imaged but there it was in the top 3 instead of not found at all
When are you going to display the 'real' SERPS Google?
Maybe, but the -asdf trick is already known since the Florida update. It first worked with only a few -asdf parameters, but now more than ten are necessary. Looks like Google fixed the hole for normal searchers but not for themselves and SEOers.
Thoughts in 2003 were that the -asdf parameters make the search query too difficult for algorithms like Hilltop, and the query falls back to the default algorithm before Florida. Since then many people have been discussing if Florida was an addition of Hilltop or another ranking / filtering algorithm.
If -asdf*13 still falls back to the old algorithm before Florida AND the old algorithm could only handle 4G documents, than the reduction by 50% in the result count that I discovered for single word queries like "restaurant" and "Shakespeare" might be caused by that. This would even be more evidence that Google searches 8G documents with the current algorithm all the time, except for money words.
If I expand this calculation, than there are actualy 2*229,000 or about 458,000 documents in the database for the keywords "mesothelioma lawyer money". Only 157,000 show up in the SERPs, so 300,000 are sandboxed. This is 66%
1.)You search for your keyphrase.
2.) In the URL string in your browser you tack &filter=0 on the end of the string.
3.) You hit enter on your keyboard to force Google to search again with that added parameter.
Alas, my site was still as lost as ever, however I do know now it's not because of duplicated content.
google profits increase sevenfold
google becomes domain registrar
google's new editing software challenges photoshop
google to branch into tv
also:
MSN Takes On Google With New Ad Campaign
- Nothing, though, saying Google Improves Core Business: Search (as MSN Search launched)
gigablast, meanwhile, says it's designed to index 200 billion pages; even this looks on low side for what's needed, but still higher than the big G.
very quick check of this, and results look decent - my site doing ok on couple of google sandboxed terms, and other sites in results looking worthwhile. To me, Google seemed to come from nowhere as it got on with business of doing search well while others wandered; hope there's scope for newcomers today, too.
Then he had a sudden identity crisis and started talking like someone else here [webmasterworld.com]. The original posting is here [webmasterworld.com], that's the one that caused all the hubbub.
If I remember right, Google at that time was being sued by older programmers who had been let go in favor of young blood, seems most reasonable to think it may have been one of those guys who just got annoyed. The odd thing is, this might just be a true leak, I think it was. What amazes me is that Google has managed to do such a good job controlling any and all leaks after that, I don't know how they do it, it's very impressive, any one of several hundred network admins could easily answer any of the central questions here, but they never do, at least not as far as I can tell. That's very unusual.
Anyway, since nobody here will admit to having the indepth understanding that could really settle the whole 32 vs 40 bit thing, it's all just speculation, it makes sense to me, and fits basically everything I've seen over the last year, and really does an excellent job explaining it all, but, again, without that in depth grasp of such things there's not much point in debating it, has that angels on the heads of pins thing.
Plus that prospectus quote, that is just a little bit too close to saying what they must say to avoid legal problems IF it's true, but also of course it could just be legal stuff, I don't think it is, but that's just an opinion.
[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 4:05 pm (utc) on Feb. 2, 2005]
[edit reason] please leave the moderating to the moderators... [/edit]
if keyword + ignored words >= 16 then the filter is removed
Multiple word searches are CPU-intensive. Also, anything that invokes advanced search features may be a special case. The minus and plus signs most likely make it a special case.
Maybe a seat-of-the-pants "complexity" number is calculated for every set of search terms that come into Google. My guess is that 15 minus signs get flagged as "complex" rather quickly.
It's also possible that the second index is much smaller and faster than the main index. If a search is "complex" they just shove it off to the faster index because that's the most efficient way to deal with it.
I think what we're looking at is basically the same situation as we had with the original Florida. All Google did was to turn up the complexity knob once everyone started doing the Florida filter thing in November 2003 with two or three nonsense phrases.
What I think is different now is that lots of noncommercial sites, from dot-org, dot-edu, and dot-gov domains, are affected. This was not the case in the original Florida. Originally, it was almost exclusively an ecommerce thing.
But the fact that noncommercial sites are noticeably affected now may be merely an evolutionary symptom. It takes longer for those less-populated domains to show up dramatically in a filter comparison.
If it is a capacity problem, then this does not preclude an anti-spam effort. Google can easily kill two birds with one stone. They have to prioritize new sites somehow, and what better way than to use some over-optimization criteria? And if you want to punish a spammer, what better way than to switch them into the secondary index?
What I'm suggesting is that even though I believe the filter is the result of a capacity problem, this does not make it an either-or situation. Given the fact that they have to divide sites into two or more piles, they would obviously select criteria that helps them as a company rather than hurts them.
Rhethorics intended.
Google for the love of God either fix the capacity problem (if that is what it is) or turn this filter off and return to what you have become a household name for.
There are a lot of faults they have to be blamed for doing nothing to solve it out.
But the sandbox massacre is a real crime they are responsible for to the Web community.
Lammert you and others can try to confuse this really great disscussion here. But we had already come to deep conclusions.
Google management this is from me:
I'm going to spread the message of your failure now as did once in the opposite way at the rise of Google.
I removed Google search from my site and now I completely dropped Adsense.
And my site really looks great without (your) advertisement. :-)
What I tried to do is explain another side of the coin, but at the end everybody is free to use it or not. It is the nice thing of a search engine. There is enough competition around in the market since Yahoo and Microsoft introduced their own engines that users have the freedom to switch and see for themselves which is the best. 2005 will be an interesting year for sure. And it will be the searchers who decide which engine is the best, not the webmasters.
For me as a search engine user - not as a webmaster - Google still gives the best results. Yahoo's SERPs feel like filled with sponsored results and MSN still has to tune the algorithm.
Well, don't know what to say more, another thread is currently active about changes in Google, so I think we should concentrate on that an maybe the whole sandbox story will be forgotten soon.
...maybe the whole sandbox story will be forgotten soon...
I admire your optimism lammert...
I think the sandbox will be synonymous with Google for quite some time - even after/if they do 'fix' it.
It has been going for so long and the impact/ramifications have been so huge – for webmasters and websearchers alike! :)
sandbox, new site filter penalty thingy wotsit ... whatever were calling it these days it just seems like madness to me ......
I saw a post elsewhere from some pissed off person who came up with a great idea of serving up a popup window to Google referrals to his site with a message and link about the great new MSN Search and how much better he thinks it is than Google .. could be a nice way to show your dissaproval to Google and exact revenge in some small way
Sounds petty to me, and it just makes the Webmaster look small-time. (Can you imagine a Fortune 500 corporation, a leading publisher, or a major online retailer trying such antics?)
I can, however, imagine the opposite, a "Stop MSN search" movement, with notices about how unpleasant a Microsoft takeover of search would be. More effective, however, would be people voluntarily and publically adding MSNbot exclusions to their robots.txt. I think you could get a large percentage of university and other personal pages to add this. Any moderately-sucessful attempt to limit MSN's index would be a sore blow to them.
I launched the site anyway. It's doing great in the SERPs. As I figured, the shrill complaints are from spammers and fast-buck artists. High-quality content has no sandbox.
High-quality content has no sandbox.Sticky me your domain and I bet i can show you why it's not sandboxed. I guarantee it has nothing to do with what you consider high quality.
I totally agree. Unfortunately I have a couple of good, quite harmless sites stuck in this thing at the moment.
I have put 3 sites up in the last 5 or 6 months. All of them are affiliate sites. They all have at least PR3 and all do ok on their keywords. They were spidered within days of putting them up and indexed with pr on the JAN update this year.
One site is just over a month old and has PR and google listings.
None of these sites is over 50 pages.
Maybe I'm lucky.
Ska
High-quality content has no sandbox.
Wrong, wrong wrong. Proven, proven, proven.
Maybe I'm lucky
Maybe you can't read.
I launched two sites over the last few months, neither spammy, both got good content, both indexed and got links and pr. And one is "doing great in the SERPs" and the other is barely there.
The shrill complaints are NOT from spammers and fast-buck artists. High-quality content DOES have a sandbox - whatever it may be. And it is a bit arrogant of you to make sweeping judgements based on your single experience.
