Am I in the 'sandbox'?

Unranked on Google

[jfodale]

Hi, I'm new to WW - some great advice on these forums, wish I would have found it sooner.

My hobby site ranks #1 on Yahoo! and #2 on MSN for a certain keyword, but is totally unranked on Google for that same keyword. The site is about 6 months old and my logs tell me that GoogleBot is spidering my site. What am I doing wrong? Am I in the Google sandbox that I keep hearing about?

Thanks in advance...

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

Almost certainly, yes.

[rebecky]

What is this proverbial "sandbox"?

[jfodale]

As far as I know, its a sort of limbo where newer sites hang out before they get added to Google's listings. There seems to be a lot of discussion and debate as to whether it really exists and how to get out of it.

I'm missing out on a lot of traffic because of this, or whatever it is, though.

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

I just don't have the time to go into this in detail but the sandbox does exist. It's a Google defect which causes new sites to be left in a quarantined area where they are fully indexed but don't feature in the search results. they can be there for up to a year or more.

We have been discussing it in this forum for about 18 months. Unfortunately we no longer have a search facility here so I cannot direct you to any of the main threads related to this.

Perhaps some of the mods can do so?

[buksida]

Agree with the above, I had a site in there for a good 8 months, its only now starting to appear for the keywords that rank #1 in Yahoo and MSN.

More discussion on the dreaded SB here:

[webmasterworld.com...]

[webmasterworld.com...]

[jfodale]

Thank you for the links - very informative reads.

The best way to go, I guess, is to just wait it out ... go on with business as usual.