Sandbox

[discrete298]

My site is about 8 months old and gets decent traffic from Yahoo and MSN, but only gets only a couple of visitors a day from Google for mostly obscure keyphrase searches. The site has many inbound links from pages with PR 5 or higher.

The question is, Is this site in G's sandbox? How long does it take for a site to break out of the sandbox? How will I know when my site gets out of the sandbox?

[indias next no1]

same thing to me, i started my second site on feb of this year and still getting only 100 visitors from all the search engines. and now started a third website last week - a news portal with daily updation, i think i have to wait some 1 or 2 years to get a decent trafifc in thousands.

[BillyS]

There is no sandbox. Google views websites like fine red wine - they're not ready for consumption until they've aged a bit.

[texasville]

right! there is no sandbox...it's a litterbox...I been playing in it for months and my traffic is crappy.

No kidding? You get a couple of hits a day from google? Wow...don't know what I'd do if I ever saw the name google in my tracking logs. Faint and fall out.

Thank the Lord there is msn and yahoo. but I keep hearing google provides roughly 3 times those 2 combined.
Tell you what is funny tho. Google has done well at indexing my site for a while now. Last month it has hit my main page at least every 2 days. Sometimes every day and updating the cache. Last week it has recached 5 times. LOL! Google's bot is the only thing really eating my bandwidth!

[Rollo]

I feel your pain... Google's got over 40,000 pages indexed on one of my sites and I get about 20 visitors a day... if there's no sandbox, what are the odds of that happening randomly? ...

=>zero

[discrete298]

I know there are two types of philosophies about G's sandbox. One side says that sandbox exists, other thinks otherwise. I do not want to matter and anti-matter to collide in this thread. I want to pick the brains of the people who believe there is a sandbox.

How a site percolates through this sandbox? Which bell will ring when the site breaks through? Are there any bells? Does this bell only ring during an update or right after an update?

[McMohan]

Google views websites like fine red wine - they're not ready for consumption until they've aged a bit

Yes. This long sentence is popularly called as Sandbox in short :)

How long does it take for a site to break out of the sandbox? How will I know when my site gets out of the sandbox?

If you have already spent 8 months, in all probability, the next major update your site should be ranking where it deserves to be. If it does, you will know either by keywords that you track ranking better or by traffic logs.

Best Wishes

[Wizard]

I have two language versions of the same site, in one language its main keyphrase returns 2.7 millions results, and the site came out from sandbox after 3 months, just after it got more inbound links from different sites. In other language, main keyphrase returns 54 millions results, and it's still sandboxed after 10 months. All language versions have the same PR and approximately the same amount of inbound links.

So perhaps you leave the sandbox after getting enough quality inbound links comparing to how competitive the keyphrase is.

Other people say the other way round - that you're sandboxed if you get too many links too fast - but site I'm talking about is sandboxed even if I didn't spam blogs or exchange links :)) Instead, I'm waiting for DMOZ inclusion of this site and try to get only quality links from related sites, and hope it will start appearing eventually.

[texasville]

wizard- very interesting scenario- two identical sites-different languages. It appears like the site with much less competition (2.7 million results) popped out pretty fast. The other (25 million results) is in a really competitive area and is taking much longer.
It seems , based on this perfect scenario, that there must be a percentage of time based on competitiveness of terms for the filters to be removed.
Wizard- when the three month site popped out- was it during or after an update? Do you remember anything outstanding at the time of it's appearance? Did one achieve pr before the other?

[netmeg]

I don't know whether or not there's a sandbox or litterbox or blackholebox - but on one of my personal sites, where I've been getting tons of Yahoo and MSN traffic all along, after initially being very well represented in Google, it dropped out completely almost three years ago, and for over two years I only had sporadic traffic from Google until the Bourbon update in May, when it took off again - bigtime. I don't know why, I tried everything I could think of during those two plus years, to absolutely no avail, and suddenly - boom - it took off.

[Precious pearls]

Hello friend,
As far as i know about Google it has very long list of sites. It is also happening that new sites getting payed links from hire PR sites. This way they get higher PR as well Google does not consider those sites. No one can tell when your site will be counted. A suggestion for you that keep on improving contents. Hope your site will be considered soon.
Cheers
P_P.

[stargeek]

if you are in the ODP, check out google's directory for some interesting stuff about the sandbox.

[McMohan]

if you are in the ODP, check out google's directory for some interesting stuff about the sandbox

Elaborate please?

[JoeHouse]

Hi All

Been playing in the sandbox for about 8 months too.

The sad part is it appears the sandbox time period is starting to lenghten for new sites. First we heard 4 to 6 months, now we are hearing 8 to 12 months and more.

The interesting thing about it all is I am starting to see these other engines starting to play the same game too.

Little things like alexa wont have your sites image up, getting crappy referral links on minor keywords and not your main etc....not just Google everywhere.

I think when you are out you are out everywhere almost all at the same time.

I have witness others when they got out were overwhelmed will traffic/sales and it all happened the same time from every direction. So when you are out you will know it.

If you ask me I think there was some type of convention where all the engines got together and decided this is how things are going to be.

[stargeek]

re: the google directory and the sandbox:

I noticed (a number of months ago now, but it may still be the case) that sites in the ODP, that had toolbar PR, and were in the "sandbox" showed a white directory PR and were listed at the bottom of the category, not ranked by PR as the rest are.
If someone is keeping an eye on a site that meets these requirements perhaps they could update us as to wether or not this is still the case, I'll look around and see if i can see anything.

[PlanetTokyo]

I think BillyS just created a new term. My site is stuck in a red wine bottle. Can someone please hand me a corkscrew?

stargeek. My site meets your requirements, however it looks perfectly normal in the google directory. Page rank indicator appears normal and it's sorted by pagerank - not at the bottom of the listing.

[modemmike]

My site is at the top of Google directory (#3 to be exact out of about 50) and shows PR but the toolbar does not... site is in litterbox after a 301 redirect. One new page actually appears in the SERP's but nothing else and when I do find my pages they are not supplement results.

[roodle]

I reckon Texasville might have a point about sandbox duration in relation to competitiveness of subject matter/terms.

I launched a fairly niche subject site in Feb 2004. Got some good on-topic backlinks of PR no higher than 4. It was struggling for a month (sandbox?), then bombed out in March (I think due to a Google update/algo shift) then reappeared in April and has gone from strength to strength. Most competition in keywords is about 3.5 million though. It's also more academic than commercial in its general style/content.

Getting into ODP (4 months ago) also helped, in the sense of results that only made page 2 previously are now on page 1.

I never really noticed any "coming out of the sandbox" type thing, unless unknown to me it's still in the sandbox!

[cgchris99]

If google is the premier search engine, how is that nearly all sites created in say the last year do NOT appear in the google SERPS.

How long before the people that use google for searching figure this out and start using the competition like MSN or Yahoo.

In the past, google was the best because it had the most Up-to-date results. Obviously that is no longer the case. Is definitely not the most up to date.

[UK_Web_Guy]

Maybe a site must pass the eval.google.com test before it comes out of the sandbox.

P.S. I can't believe people still come out with "there is no sandbox" - very amusing!

[stargeek]

what do you mean by
eval.google.com

[UK_Web_Guy]

Take a look back at [webmasterworld.com...]

Everybody says "how long will it take to get out of the sandbox?", but I think people should be asking themselves, "would my site pass a manual review for relevancy and worth?"

Maybe this is one of the keys to coming out of the sandbox.....

[brantw]

What is the difference between being in the sandbox and when doing a site:mydomain.com search the results say your search does not match any documents? I can't figure out if this is the sandbox or its google telling me that my site Doesn't even exist at all. I ask this because I purchased a previously expired domain that never seemed to be on google and I can't figure out what to do. I spent two months putting a lot of effort into creating ibl's and everything else I can do and google thinks i don't exist.

[texasville]

brantw- I had a client-same thing. First thing I did was to run a check on their host with the site: command. Google didn't know who they were either. Or maybe I should say-didn't want to know them anymore. Check out your host. Not saying that is the problem but it is one source of problems.

[brantw]

My host turned up over 50,000 matches with site:myhost.com I'm beginning to think it's because I bought an expired domain. I just wish there was some way to find out so I don't waste all my time on this domain

[roodle]

Maybe someone should start a new thread under the title "How do you know you are in the sandbox?". I always thought it meant you got instant artificially high rankings for a handful of pages until G came back and assessed the site properly, after which time you might bomb out completely or rank well depending on what G decides.

[MHes]

>What is the difference between being in the sandbox and when doing a site:mydomain.com search the results say your search does not match any documents?

Sandboxed sites are in the index but fail to rank well on targeted and/or competitive searches.

[chopin2256]

I have heard there are ways to beat the sandbox (for a new site) but I am not quite sure if the information I got was right or accurate. I went to an interview for an SEO job awhile back, and the guy told me it is possible to beat the sandbox by "paying" some sort of fee, to either google, or some kind of directory. I kinda forgot what he exactly said, but I know what I heard and he said it is possible by paying a fee. Is this guy correct, or was he giving out false information?

He also said the sandbox existed for the sole purpose of keeping spammers out (because a spammer can make alot of money on Google, and they used to). The reason MSN and Yahoo do not have this sandbox is because Google is the market leader. That I believe....but to beat the sandbox with a fee sounds unfair...however, is it true?

[edited by: chopin2256 at 6:36 pm (utc) on Sep. 23, 2005]

[texasville]

I don't think he had a clue.

[texasville]

brantw- I would suggest submitting a sitemap to google.