This new "Sandbox" Real or Not?

A waiting lobby before assessed?

[Champion]

What is this "Sandbox" are all new sites added to a "Lobby" type entrance to google?

Is this a way for google to monitor incoming competition? A way to block optimized good quality sites from taking over the search results?

Any opinions on my theory?

[ThomasB]

There's something, but nobody really knows what it is.

I think that describes the situation best. There are some rumors but from my testing none of them is true. It's like after Florida when everybody announced changes that got themself out of OOP. But if you asked what exactly they did and if they changed nothing else they couldn't answer.

[Champion]

This type of activity can get google into hot water and fast. In a few months, every little move that google makes will be magnified. Little mistakes will become big mistakes.

Look at CNN, they removed google search box/results from the cnn website. Who's to say the CEO of CNN, maybe his sons' website was removed during florida update for no reason. Its a much smaller world than google predicts, with more and more competition, as well as more and more people coming forward with problems and complaints.

The last people you want to screw is the public, whether they own websites OR simply surf.
To me florida update will never be forgotten by website owners LARGE or small.

What happened was google built businesses up, then pulled the plug. Then they acted as if nothing happened, and sent replies to curious business owners saying because it was free, it could be yanked at any time.

This type of behaviour is like a catapault. Use businesses worldwide, use their data, to make their business grow and grow over the years. Then once they become so big every business relies on them, pull their plug and go public IPO.

This type of behaviour will haunt them. As much as I did love google over the years, it took one day to hate them forever. Until the day things go back before florida update I will always feel the same for the rest of my life. This is what happens when you trust someone (google) over the years.

Now not only would they have to go back before the florida udpdate with fully crawled business websites, they would also have to build their trust back. How they would do that I have no idea.

For now I am enjoying Yahoo! more, for the simple reason I haven't been let down by them. However they COULD do the same thing as google did. If Yahoo has the brainpower, Yahoo will not act like google ever did.

Could the activity of google been the reason for Yahoo to pull their Google Results a while back?

More and more large companies I interviewed in the past several weeks feel the same way I do. And now having to trademark their own company name from search results has just added more disgust.

Will google end up like MSN search has?
Good possibility.

[Shawn Steele]

"Look at CNN, they removed google search box/results from the cnn website. Who's to say the CEO of CNN, maybe his sons' website was removed during florida update for no reason. Its a much smaller world than google predicts, with more and more competition, as well as more and more people coming forward with problems and complaints. "

I didnt know that....it's really interesting. Wonder whats next.

[Allergic]

I personaly think the new sandbox is to counter the "firsts days in index" glitch where is give you very good ranking results with all your keywords in your title tag.

[ByronM]

I thought CNN removed google because they chose to use Overture sponsored listings and eventually switch to Yahoo search..

however, i don't seem to understand why AOL Timewarner has different divisions making different contracts with heavily competing companies instead of investing in there own or getting a good deal with a solid partner

[rfgdxm1]

>Is this a way for google to monitor incoming competition? A way to block optimized good quality sites from taking over the search results?

My guess is to thwart hit and run spammers. Any serious spammer is gonna have a lot of disposable domain names, and the ability to host them at will. For a spammer, doing well for a couple days for a big money SERP is the goal. If that spam site falls to oblivion, keep tossing up new sites and repeat the process.

With the massive database of sites Google has to manage, spotting a spam site on the fly is beyond their technical capability. By keeping new sites sandboxed for a while, this gives the computers time to analyze it more closely for signs that it is just a spam doorway page, etc. The trick is to be able to keep new sites in the sandbox for a short enough period of time the freshness of the index isn't seriously impaired. Unfortunately, its either fight spam, or go for maximum freshness. Both can't be done at this time.

[webnewton]

My theory is like this:

1)Google has employed Hiltop to ensure that only authoriy pages make it to the top. While ranking an expert it also takes into account the age of the web page and its consitency in SERPS over the time.

2)For SEO's who're expert in manupulating the search engine results its' a child play to create a site and bring it on the top of SERPS in a matter of 2-3 months and getting a nice PR for the site by getting links from high PR sites. Mind it PR is a criteria which basically decides the authority and popularity of a web page.

3) Sand boxing is for such pages which gain high PR's and link popularity is a very short period of time.If google don't put a control at such pages the results would fluctuate very rapidly and would be flooded by commercial sites.(Mind it this also interfers with the search engine's motive of providing the best mix of available pages of the topic)

4) Sandboxing makes sure that such "unnaturally growing pages" were given a halt. Google then keep a watch on such pages and let them go into main SERPS after some time.

5)Or we can take it like this. Before florida the deep indexeing used to happen after aroud 3-4 months.
During this indexing goolge used to pick all newly added sites and produce the SERPS including them
Now a days picking up of new sites is rapid but mixing of the results takes the same time.

I hope i made some sense.

[ILuvSrchEngines]

Funny how Yahoo indexes the same WWW that Google does and Yahoo manages to present excellent results without blocking everyone and blaming it on spam sites. Maybe Google has managed to find a WWW that yahoo is not aware of, where all of that invisible nasty spam exists. The Google spam twilight zone perhaps.

[GranPops]

sandbox, or algo needs tweaking?

of interest

a test site nearly 1 year old, does not appear in cache on G toolbar, nor using domain, nor any other method, however...............

still No.1 and the cache appears when clicked in SERPS

GranPops

[jojojo]

so lets say you had 100 high pr links at your disposal... how many new links would you add per day or per week to avoid being flagged do you think?

rather than linking all 100 sites to this new site on day 1 whether its new or old?

[ThomasB]

jojojo, I think the problem is that we don't even know if the sandbox is triggered by the amount of links you receive within a specific time frame. If they go for that it would be pretty hard for a new company to get their sites in the SERPs if they send out press releases and get lots of links within 1 or 2 days. If that really triggers the sandbox there must be a natural way to avoid that though getting lots of links.

[hermosa]

Well very interesting developments. My sites have been gradually becoming our of the sandbox. One site was new as of early January. The other was at another server and I used URL forwarding (using my domain name www.bluewidgets.com) Last week some of the most important pages I have hit number 1 and 2 positions for:

"important keyword mylocation"

Googlebot has been regularly crawling my sites (every day). Three days ago, I notice that it did a DEEP crawl and hit almost every page. Today I notice that one of my most important pages is at position 47 for:

"important keyword"

Is this a good time to make some minor modifications to keep it coming. I thought it was because I reduced the number of times "important keyword" was on the page. Took it out of all but 2 <H> tags and added links to the images. Perhaps this is just coincidence. Maybe it was the sandbox penalty. Should I add it back in to a couple of hte <H> tags?

[jojojo]

"jojojo, I think the problem is that we don't even know if the sandbox is triggered by the amount of links you receive within a specific time frame. If they go for that it would be pretty hard for a new company to get their sites in the SERPs if they send out press releases and get lots of links within 1 or 2 days. If that really triggers the sandbox there must be a natural way to avoid that though getting lots of links."

cool but what about adding lots of links at once in general? do it or avoid it and add them gradually?

[power_iq]

Well, try

+com

and

+com -cdgrt -gtge -cgtr -ttgr -vhztt -evzt -fcztet -fzhd -rtfg

It has nothing to do with the age of a Page or how many Links they became in a short Period.

I have a site about Physics. There is just ONE Link pointing to this Website. When seaching for my Keyword the site could not be found in the first 1000 results. With -wegweg ... I can see it on Page 2. The one Link is sure no Expert-Document for this Theme. The Website and the Link are since one year in the Index.

What Do you mean?

Regards, Tom

[ThomasB]

power_iq, very good point. I think that leads us to the position where we have to be sure that you have to be sure that you don't trigger any other filter like OOP or duplicate content. Unless you know that you can't say anything imho.

[march83]

I am as certain as I can be a "sandbox" of some sort is used. I put a new site up about 4-5 months ago and for the first week or so it ranked well but then suddenly disappeared.

At the first update after a couple of months it got PR5, all the backlinks showed up and every page was indexed. It didn't rank at all though, not even for the site name, which is pretty unique. Then last week it suddenly appeared near the top on my KWs, no back links added no PR change.

Make of that what you will, it does seem there is a temporary "new site" penalty given under certain circumstances.

[edited by: march83 at 1:19 pm (utc) on May 17, 2004]

[sf22]

My whole page was in the sandbox for about, no joke, 6 months.

[ILuvSrchEngines]

>My whole page was in the sandbox for about, no joke, 6 months.

If it is real, maybe it should be renamed to the Google s$@# can. But that would be hard to type on a public forum.

[soapystar]

Funny how Yahoo indexes the same WWW that Google does and Yahoo manages to present excellent results without blocking everyone and blaming it on spam sites.

have you checked the Yahoo forum? Yahoo dont filter and sideline sites like Google does which allows the sites an opportunity of having their day some time in the future, they simply toss them away forever, banned for life.

[ILuvSrchEngines]

have you checked the Yahoo forum? Yahoo dont filter and sideline sites like Google does which allows the sites an opportunity of having their day some time in the future, they simply toss them away forever, banned for life.

You have to know that is the exception to the rule with Yahoo. I have been involved in lot of web sites and you can not possibly compare the scale of what Yahoo does to what Google does with their filtering since Florida. Google blocks sites whether they have commited a sin or not and they have virtually locked out mom-and-pop web sites completely with their massive filtering (Hilltop or whatever it is).

[Sathish]

Sandbox Yes or No! - Forget that.

Now let us all thank google for forcing us to plan all our projects well before :)

[power_iq]

Perhaps something new :-)

One of my site lost title and descr. and the Ranking, too.

but www.mydomain.com -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf

and... there she is...