Nailing down the "sandbox"

How deep is the sand? Who has to play there?

[suidas]

I've seen a lot of messages about the sandbox, but none of them are clear about how major the effect is. Recently someone responded to a why-isn't-my-site-number-one request with:

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.

[nuevojefe]

The only advertising we have had on our site is Adsense...may we be let out of the sandbox now? Please?

What does that have to do with anything?

[europeforvisitors]

I would suggest that Google abandon whatever strategy it began with the sandbox nonsense and think in terms of fresh, pertinent serps, rather than manipulating search results in hopes of bumping up the profit margin, (to satisfy investors).

Where do you get the idea that Google is "manipulating search results in hopes of bumping up the profit margin"? On the contrary: It's using the sandbox to make it harder for SEOs to manipulate search results in hopes of bumping up their clients' (or their own) profit margins.

The sandbox wouldn't be necessary if SEOs and affiliates weren't flooding the Web with millions of autogenerated pages and thousands of disposable domains.

[April]

I must add, I have a 200+ page site which for a 2 word money term was on page 18-20 of google. All of a sudden it has jolted to the top of page 2 48 hours ago. Of course with a little more SEO I am sure I can hit #1-5.

I have done nothing different, it just leaped - All of my competitors have stayed exactly the same, unaffecting anybody else.

Site was launched September '04 and have many high PR backlinks dating from its launch then more inbound links added every few days from good sources.

Site is PR4, Listed on a few PR 6 website, few PR5/4 but 100's of 3 and 2 pr. Listed on DMOZ but not Yahoo (too expensive for my liking).

I felt as though I was in a sandbox - intext: and inanchor: commands always showed me where I aught to have been, now after almost 6 months I am there!

I am almost certain it was some sort of sandbox - I just don't have a clue why I came out of it in such style?!?

FYI msn search (now beta is used) lists my site as #1 solidly for all my terms, is google maybe 'bending' its algo a bit?

[LostOne]

"is google maybe 'bending' its algo a bit?"

That's putting it mildly--it's wrapped in confusion IMO

[nuevojefe]

Hi April,

Welcome to WW.

Site was launched September '04 and have many high PR backlinks dating from its launch then more inbound links added every few days from good sources.

Site is PR4, Listed on a few PR 6 website, few PR5/4 but 100's of 3 and 2 pr. Listed on DMOZ but not Yahoo (too expensive for my liking).

I thought the site (as referenced in quote 1) had "many high PR backlinks"? A few PR6 and PR5 doesn't really constitute many high PR backlinks.

You said you have hundreds of 3's and 2's, but that they are from good sources. What is your definition of good sources?

I felt as though I was in a sandbox - intext: and inanchor: commands always showed me where I aught to have been, now after almost 6 months I am there!

That's good if you're getting released after almost 5 months, some have waited much longer and may never get out!

[Jakpot]

Do I think Google is working through issues with it's algo?
They seem to create their own issues and they escalated
beginning in November 04.
To many cooks, maybe?

[dazzlindonna]

See where your sandboxed site would rank if it weren't sandboxed.

your keyword -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf

(must be at least 13 nonsense words)

[RussellC]

dazzlindonna: does this old trick still work? If this is really the case my sandboxed site will be doing pretty well when it comes out. Almost been a year. (March 04)

[dazzlindonna]

It's working (again) at the moment. No idea how long it will last though.

[Powdork]

It's working for me. Very interesting indeed. And promising too.

[squared]

It's working for me too. I can't believe I've been sandboxed. For crying out loud this was my FIRST e-commerce site. All the other information sites I've done just to make the world a better place have done really well. Oh well. That's the way the cookie crumbles.

-Squared

[Imaster]

Mindblowing. I would beat Yahoo with the kind of ranking my new site is showing :)

[2by4]

dazzlindonna, thanks for that tip, I wasn't sure if my site was in the sandbox or not, at least the old pages in it, but sure enough, there it is, at number one for its keywords. That's now 6 months in it. So for the last 6 months, the people looking for what we have on our site, which noone else has in that form, and who have used Google, which most in that market still do, have not found what they were looking for. Minus sandbox, that puts me at number 1 currently in all 3 search engines for those keywords. And no, it's not an adwords question, it's free product, done as a service to the web community. Thanks google, you've really helped out everyone who was relying on you for delivering a good, uptodate set of results, and who aren't aware that they aren't getting it.

Google needs to start figuring out better ways to block spam, not the web. If they can't do this job, a new search engine will come out that can. Of course, that's assuming this is unrelated to boosting adwords income, which is a bit naive to believe, which means sandbox stays with us until shares are sold, at least, I'd say it's risky maintaining it much longer than that, but you can count on market intertia and habits for a while. However, check altavista to see how long you can do that for.

[edited by: 2by4 at 9:15 pm (utc) on Jan. 23, 2005]

[Powdork]

Even the breast cancer foundation of arizona will get some traffic from Google once people start searching for breast cancer foundation of arizona -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf

[steveb]

I see a site get un-sanboxed for a two word query when it is connected via a dash (-) but not when in quotes (""), and not when just typed as two words.

<using the 13 thingees in all cases>

[dickbaker]

Hmmm. When I try it, only two of of a group of thirteen key phrases I'm targetting are #1. The others are still stuck anywhere from #26 to #260 or so.

For another group of 50 key phrases, it's #1.

Keyword/keyphrase density for the first group of 13 is between 6 and 12%.

Keyword density for the group of 50 is only about 3%.

I'm befuddled.

[econman]

I see somewhat similar results to those just posted.

In my case, our sandboxed site uses two keywords connected by a dash as the domain name (left of the .TLD) With the 13 -asdf added, if I search for the two keywords connected by a dash our site suddenly jumps to the number one position; nowhere to be seen without the dash, even using quotes, etc. Same problem for various combinations I've experimented with (using the most competitive of those two keywords plus one other word, virtually without regard to how non-competitive the second word is).

On beta.msn we rank number one for the two keywords used in the domain name, with or without the dash, and despite the fact that one of these words is fairly competitive, and despite the fact that we haven't done any SEO to speak of.

The site was launched around September, with lots of solid content, but no significant SEO effort (still trying to learn, lots of other things keeping us busy).

Reported PR of 4 or 3, depending on the page. Relatively few inbound links, but slowly adding them.

Main insight I can contribute: competitiveness of the keyword might be a factor, but links probably aren't the only thing being downplayed by google for new sites; we have relatively few inbound links, and I seriously doubt the difference in ranking would only be due to suppressing our (relatively few) links.

[paradoxos]

I just used the "-asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf" with my search words and I am #1!

What does this mean? If I remove it I'm no where to be found.

(I still think it is because I use AdWords. 1. Maybe the adwords artificially inflates my ranking so they don't let adwords users go to in the top? 2. They also like that I'm paying for clicks rather than getting them for free.)

[paradoxos]

In fact I just noticed with the "-asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf" the top two results match the top two Adwords.

[Powdork]

What does this mean? If I remove it I'm no where to be found.

It doesn't necessarily mean anything.
This could have been the case all along. Previously, fewer nonsense words could bring on the effect but they fixed that. Perhaps 13 nonsense words always worked but they only recently changed the allowed words in a query from 10 to 32. That may be why we are noticing this now. If thats the case you can guess they are working on a way to remove the ability to do this.
OTOH perhaps they are just getting ready to let us in.

[div01]

breast cancer foundation of arizona -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf

Powdork, thanks for sharing that excellent example.

[layer8]

I'm no where on the serps and my last visitor from Google was a long time ago after doing work on a site that had a fair amount of google success. Serps have been really bad since i made a whole lot of good changes and yet by adding -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf to all my keyword phrases im in the top 3 for all my keyword phrases.

I have a good quality site, surely its got to mean something?

[McMohan]

This 13 word negative words bring about the near results that allin... would bring, just the positions are different depending on whether you are doing a allintext, allintitle etc, but the set of sites that rank are almost same.

I have now almost switched over to searching with allintext commands while searching for anything and thats sad :(

Mc

[sparticus]

[User deleted, made a bad typo]

[edited by: sparticus at 8:24 am (utc) on Jan. 24, 2005]

[sparticus]

I've got a site which has been around for four years now, but it had a major content change in around March 2004 and was soon lost in what appears to be a sandbox-shaped void. The site appears exactly where you'd expect it to if you use the -asdf(x13) trick, I'm wondering if anyone else has seen this - ie. a 'sandboxed' site which has been around for years?

On another note, I notice that the breast cancer website cited as an example of sandboxing has quite a few backward links from the 'directory' pages of online gambling and pharmacy sites, could there be any hints in there about the site's no-show in Google? While I'm not denying the credibility of the Breast Cancer site, it reeks of suspect SEO to me. (And why isn't the site a .org?)

[jaffstar]

If my site ranks top 10 under allinanchor,allintitle,text etc but is nowhere to be found in the top 1000 Serps, could this mean sandboxed?

Anyone else seeing this?

[conor]

-asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf results are pre-Hilltop filter and are not "Sand box" related.

[edited by: conor at 10:19 am (utc) on Jan. 24, 2005]

[robster124]

I'm with Conor here.

The -asdf results show seemingly new sites which are not sandboxed merely filtered in some way.

[jaffstar]

-asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf results are pre-Hilltop filter and are not "Sand box" related.

I agree. I ran this test on my site, and it did not show up.

I have done some more research, it appears many people who think they are sandboxed, are in the same boat as me.

Allinanchor:top 10
Allintitle:top 10
Allintext:top 10

Serps not in top 1000.

Who else?

[sem4u]

Yes I have a couple of sites which are top 10 allintitle, text and anchor. They also show up top 10 and even #1 with the filter search.