Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
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?
"How do you know you are in the sandbox?".
I’ll take a crack at it, and please the correct term these days is “Filter”!
Your site is indexed
Your site has PageRank
It is regularly crawled, displaying cache dates not more than 10 days old
If you search for the site by entering www.xyz.com, it appears with the proper title, snippet, and url (www, or no www whichever you picked)
You rank in the top 20 for allinanchor
You rank in the top 20 for allintext
You rank in the top 20 for allintitle
You do not rank within the first 1000 places for the keyword the site was designed for
No. There is no magic way to avoid sandbox. It is a collection of new algos, some of which are applied to links which makes the pr they pass 'mature' over time.
People who say they have a site or a method that avoids sandbox are deluding themselves.
People who say they have a site or a method that avoids sandbox are deluding themselves.
Scary, because this guy apparently is an SEO professional. Apparently these guys do SEO for big sites such as Sony, TurboTax, and more. When I asked the question, is there a way around the sandbox, I was so shocked he said you can pay for a publication (or something like that). I think I forgot what he said because I didn't expect him to even say yes! Really weird. Perhaps this guy is a bit behind on times. But I figured I would at least ask you guys about this.
Your site is indexed
Your site has PageRank
It is regularly crawled, displaying cache dates not more than 10 days old
If you search for the site by entering www.xyz.com, it appears with the proper title, snippet, and url (www, or no www whichever you picked)
You rank in the top 20 for allinanchor
You rank in the top 20 for allintext
You rank in the top 20 for allintitle
You do not rank within the first 1000 places for the keyword the site was designed for
If this is sandbox, then my site is in it. Each and every statement apply for my 8 month old website.
Apparently these guys do SEO for big sites such as Sony, TurboTax, and more
Guys who handle bluechip companies are the last ones to talk authoritatively about sandbox. They have the luxury of optimizing sites that come with high natural PR and old enough to have any sandbox problems.
The everyday webmaster who handles new sites, gets upclose with sandbox realities.
added: I had the opportunity of optimizing a Fortune 1000 website, and that job was a cakewalk compared to what we face with new websites in competitive field.
Texasville, it's got to be more than just the simple competitiveness of the kw phrases involved. One of my clients spent over a year in the sandbox, the most important kw phrase returns 334,000 results, and it's for a regional (locality related) kw expression.
Your site is indexed
Your site has PageRank
It is regularly crawled, displaying cache dates not more than 10 days old
If you search for the site by entering www.xyz.com, it appears with the proper title, snippet, and url (www, or no www whichever you picked)
You rank in the top 20 for allinanchor
You rank in the top 20 for allintext
You rank in the top 20 for allintitle
You do not rank within the first 1000 places for the keyword the site was designed for
That is my site to a key. pagerank 4, crawlwed twice a week at least etc...
The thing is, my site has been around since april 2004, so could i really be in the sandbox now? I'm ranking well in MSN, and searching for one of my most competitive keywords in ask reveals that I have the top spot!
So why does google hate me so much?
They are both non-profit sites that were created in November/December last year and they are featuring quite highly for their main keywords. I suspect that they may go higher still but they have definitely been outed.
Dont give up!
Guys who handle bluechip companies are the last ones to talk authoritatively about sandbox. They have the luxury of optimizing sites that come with high natural PR and old enough to have any sandbox problems.
Couldn't have been put better. In fact all the blue chips or huge corporations need to do is place the keyword in the title and they're on the first page. A huge Google flaw IMO.
How much extra traffic are you getting now?
My traffic looks up by about 50% so far but I don't really pay much attention to the stats from these sites. They are 100% non-commercial and as such they don't earn me anything. Both of them were created at no charge for clubs of which I am a member.
I was just using them for SEO research.
That was my site exactly- until yesterday. Not only did I rank top 20 for allins but for many I was #1. However, it is a slow ascent in that for some keyphrases in serps I am in the top 200- some I am in top 40. I only got a couple of hits yesterday from google but that is why I ran the serps.
This site is an online presence for a brick and mortar business. It isn't a huge category as the serps generally return less than one million returns but the sites in it that are in the top 40 are very professional, highly optimized sites. Some have been in the dmoz for years. The top performing use hidden links and text. These are "high ticket items" generally purchase runs around $1000 to $2000 for main product and don't expect more than 200 hits a day on the site. So far msn and yahoo provide about 60-70 hits a day and the site ranks extremely well in those two.
Site was first created may '04 and I did a complete redesign in may '05.It really wasn't performing well before that. It disappearred completely from google right after the rebuild. Slowly it reindexed. Then in June it started getting completely indexed but not in top 1000 serps. August was intermitent on it's indexing. Starting in August it got pagerank of 2 on inner pages. Index page only carries pr1. rusty brick predicts index page will stay one but inner pages will go to pr6? go figure.
End of August I had the nicest indexing and descriptions. It was a perfect indexing. Last three weeks google went from visiting every ten days to every other day. It started recaching the page every time.
Now in short, I would never have rebuilt the page as quickly as I did if I had realized the sandbox effect. I started visiting the forums here and every time I learned something, I went back and tweaked the pages. Before this, I was strictly web design and no seo. I lost a client to a black hat firm because the sites I had designed did not rank well. Why? No links- no promotion. I wasn't paid to do that. So, I decided to take this particular site as far as it would go in it's category. I've put many, many hours for free into it. The redesign, the link building, the tweaking, writing articles and getting them published.
Well, now I am rambling. Hopefully, this site will be de-sandboxed completely soon. All filters off. It is completely white hat and should stabilize in the top 10 soon. If it is any indication for the rest of what is in the top 10, it should stay there quite a long time.
Miop- interesting observation but somebody has to rank at the top so- is it possible that your drop in page rank is due to loss of ibl's? Maybe some of those also carried those particular keywords as anchor text?
Something else I have noticed lately when looking at my backlinks is how many of them have dropped into the supplemental results. Particularly those that were from articles I published. Lots of those. Wish I could be more help on this.
pardon my ignorance, but what are 'supplemental results', and how can you tell between them and 'normal results'.
Supplemental results are labeled as such by google. After the title of site and snippet of text from the site, the next line shows:
www.sitename.com - 35k - Supplemental Result
instead of
www.sitename.com - 35k .
It may be worth pointing out that if you are in a competitive field and you emerge from the sandbox you can expect results far better than I am seeing. for example on one of my commercial sites Google provides 91.86% of my traffic. If this site had come out it would have meant a 10 - 12 fold increase.
Are you saying that Google treats sites in sandbox better than those who never experienced it?
I am only asking because I have been sitting in the box for close to 6 months and I have done 1000 things right and I am waiting and praying to get out soon.
Currently I see very little traffic at all from google. At this point I am looking for a little reassurance that I will get out and things will start to pick up.
In conclusion, when you get out of the sandbox, you coming running out of the box instead of walking? Am I understanding that correctly?
If yes, why do you thing that is?
Are you saying that Google treats sites in sandbox better than those who never experienced it?
Perhaps I was not making myself clear. I was talking about a best case scenario. What I was saying was that if the site I mentioned had been in the sandbox, came out, and settled in its current position then my traffic on that site would have increased by about 10 -12 fold.
It could actually be much better than this or not so good. The fact that you have served your time in the sandbox does not give you any advantage wrt ranking. This is all dependent on how successfully you have optimised your site. If it is badly optimised you will come out of the box and see little change in traffic while if you have did a good SEO job on it you should see a very large increase. Little has changed in this respect.
Your final placement pre-sandbox was all down to how well your site had been optimised, quality of inbound links, etc. This still applies when you come out of the box.
Seriously though, could you possibly be sandboxed for nearly 18 months?
Also, duplicate content wise, my new Irish site is near identical to my .co.uk site, except for the .ie extension, and prices in Euros, and a few other miner changes. Would i be penalised for this, google can see that they are different sites (.ie vs .co.uk), hosted in 2 different countries.
I am sure we all have opinions on this subject. Lets here them.
Maybe we can help each other figure this out.
