Does the "Sandbox" still exist?

[MrSpeed]

I don't have that many sites to do extensive testing but I seem to be getting better rankings on sites much faster than a year ago. Maybe I'm starting sites with better quality inbounds or a more natural link building pace. I don't know.

What have others seen in regards to the sandbox?

[Quadrille]

I see enough people in trouble with new sites to believe there is still 'an issue' with new sites and Google; but I suspect people are learning the necessary action to minimise problems - especially when moving content from old to new - so there are fewer disasters than a couple of years ago.

And yes, there seem to be many more claims of 'no problem' - I'm not sure I believe them all, however. ;)

[Go60Guy]

I wouldn't exactly say there's no problem. I'm observing one of my newer sites fluctuate wildly in the serps. It seems it gets buried for about three days and then surfaces for about three days, and then sinks again and then comes back. Its bobbing about. I'm not sure what to make of it.

[Whitey]

There's a few interesting threads around which might enlighten your thinking here:

The Google Sandbox - building trust to get beyond the filters

[webmasterworld.com...]

and

Google does take time to extend trust to a new site and list them in regular search results - but it is not a fixed amount of time, so there's no simple answer to the question "how long". They are looking for various signs of quality and trust, epecially the natural growth of links from other quality and trusted sites.

[webmasterworld.com...]

In terms of "delay filter" attributable to clearing a site to a "trusted" status, whereupon the site appears in the SERP's, this appears to be happening not only to new site's, but site's with pages that Google considers to be "new".

From my experience "new" can mean, a new site, new "added pages", new content or changed URL's, both or all .

Long established sites with good IBL's [ inbound links ], with good PR can even find themselves in this position, so I've yet to discover the answers to the golden rules of G's secret algo.

[Quadrille]

Three words: stability, stability and stability!

[Altair]

I assume you mean by "sandbox" that the seach engine biases ranking lower for newer sites (newer domain names).

Our experience is that Yahoo and MSN Search might actually do this more than Google.

This is a sort of low-tech spam control technique. Spammers are constantly putting up new sites, being found and banned, getting new domains, putting them up, etc. An older site is much less likely to be spam.

[Go60Guy]

Long established sites with good IBL's [ inbound links ], with good PR can even find themselves in this position, so I've yet to discover the answers to the golden rules of G's secret algo.

Over the last three months I've added a wealth of content to an old site with good ibl's. Those pages consistently rank from about 61 through 90 even for the most exotic long tail searches and regardless of how many results are shown in the serps. What I'm hoping is that this is simply the"sandbox" effect and that there will be a breakout to the upside in a few months.

Please tell me I'm right.

[Whitey]

Please tell me I'm right.

Are some of the pages shown "supplemental" . If so, this may be an indication that Google's time delay filter is establishing validations of "trust".

How long is it since you added these pages, how many and what % of the site is it?

[Go60Guy]

None of the pages are supplemental. They probably represent now about 20% of the site. One thing I see is that in a site search they are rising in the results. At first they were ranking up in the 600 to 1000 range. Now they are around 150 to 600. I take that as a positive sign. They've been added starting in early December.

[Whitey]

It looks to me like you are going through the normal process for large numbers of pages being added.

Google seems to like pages with Ad Hoc additions, like Yahoo Answers and puts them straight into the index.

For larger page releases I'm seeing Google being a lot more "guarded". I found this remark interesting in the context of "delayed" releases :

[webmasterworld.com...]

This is a pretty common situation. The main reason for supplemental results on a new site is low PR. As your backlinks grow, your PR builds and those supplemental urls will migrate into the regular index

[ramachandra]

We have lauched product website 6 months back, build good backlinks within this period, with the recent PR update we got PR 4 for site home page and PR 3 for internal pages but still we aren't ranking for the targetted kw's, some of the non-competative kw are ranking.

Looking at this I must admit that so called Sandbox still exist.

[SEOold]

I'am constantly optimizing new sites and seeing the aging delay on all new sites. For one of my sites I have seen us come out after 7 months.

[Whitey]

SEOold - I know you said "new" sites.

- How many pages do these sites range from and to?

- Does this include sites where you have fired in a link or two to get things moving?

- Are you also seeing it applying to the adding of " new pages" [versus sites]?

[netmeg]

I launched a new site last week that immediately went to #7 (fluctuating between #7 and #8 now) - be interesting to see if it stays there. It's a revamped "official" band site that has a lot of competition from fan sites, the wikipedia entries for the band and its members, and the previous "official" site launched by a former band associate, but which isn't working properly. This one is on an entirely new URL. In the past I've launched new sites, they've done okay for a couple weeks, and then tanked and taken a few months to climb back up. So we'll see.

[m1t0s1s]

Wasn't there like 700000 results showing up in google for globalwarming awareness2007 a day after the contest was announced? I can't remember which blog said that, though.

Plus the contest winner has to follow the google webmaster guidelines; I'm sure some of the results will be splogging/spamdexing.

To Go60guy: This may interest you:
View All Your Google Supplemental Index Results [seobook.com]