Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Maneet Puri
[edited by: mona at 8:20 pm (utc) on June 14, 2007]
[edit reason] no urls - thx! [/edit]
The obvious approach is to see if you are getting decent traffic - that would be the sign of "not being in the sandbox". But I assume your question is more like "we're still not getting mugh Google traffic - how can I tell if this is what people call the sandbox, or a penalty, or just not ranking well for some other reason?"
It's important not to think of "the sandbox" as some "thing" in and of itself. What has been called "the sandbox" really the combined effect of a set of several different filters. That combination tends to delay a website's stable appearance in the search results, even though, early on, the site may have a brief period of good traffic.
The filters involved are there to measure how well Google can trust the site. And so they include watching backlinks and how they grow and so on.
If your links are growing at a healthy rate for your market (use Yahoo Sitemaps for a more complete report than Google gives) and still you see no traffic, then something is blocking you. The block could be any number of things, but thinking about "the sandbox" will probably not suggest any actions you can take to change your situation.
Understand that Google does not just block a new site for a set period of time. That was the original thinking behind people using the word "sandbox" to describe what they saw -- but it doesn't really describe the actual situation.
The algo is looking for signs that the site is one they can trust -- and that would be valuable for their users if it is returned in a search result. When those signs are present, then the URLs begin not to be filtered.
So I'd suggest this approach to be productive. First, discover what pages of yours are indexed, which pages do get traffic from Google, what search words are generating that traffic for you, and how high those pages rank. Any poor performance you discover can then be looked at from several angles that related to various ranking factors and filters:
1. Do various pages of the site have links from other domains - especially from domains that are doing well in Google.
2. Are my problem pages linked from the non-problem pages in the site?
3. Are there any obstacles to crawling some of my pages? Check for errors in robots.txt, bad links within the site, javascript links that don't appear in any straight html form, and so on.
In general,. I'm suggesting that you not use the concept of "the sandbox" in analyzing your site's performance -- because that concept doesn't give you anything you can really act on. So break down any poor performance to its details and fix each detail.
Here's one good thread I'd suggest:
Filters exist - the Sandbox doesn't. How to build Trust. [webmasterworld.com]
Understanding factors that restore and maintain results
