Sandboxed Sites - Back Together?

Do they come out together or one by one?

[McMohan]

Most of the new sites that I work with are still in the sandbox. Was just curios to know, if all the sanboxed sites come out of the sandbox during one fine major updation or one by one, over the rolling updates?

That is to say, should one be checking to see if the sites are out of the sandbox regularly or only when they know there is a major Google update? :)

Thanks

Mc

[Lothar]

The press needs to get a whiff of the sandbox (and it stinks) for Google to do anything about it. Someone with some press contacts needs to come up with a few good examples of searches for company names that are new that Google comes back with no results while Yahoo/MSN comes up with the official site. The press would have a field day with that.

[gomer]

Nice post neuron. We seem to be in the same camp regarding the sandbox being a capacity issue but I want to play devil's advocate to that point of view. You seem to have a site in the sandbox since February. I put out a in February and it came out of the sandox in June. Why did some sites come out of the sandbox (all at the same time) but others sites have been sandboxed since February? If it were strictly a capacity issue, why would some sites be treated differently? As I said previously, I did nothing special to that site, I just waited and it eventually came out of the sandbox.

I think there maybe several things going on here at once and that is why things are particularily difficult to interpret.

I agree with Scarecrow's statement

One is a capacity problem, and the other is their continuing efforts to fight spam.

[RoySpencer]

My presnt problems are consistent with most of the posts here. We changed our domain name (yeah, I know, dumb idea), and the pages at the new site have tanked in the SERPs, despite getting good PR transferred through 301 redirects. As a test, I moved one of the pages to a subdomain (same IP address), and it shot up to #2, where it remains (and where it used to be, before we changed domain names).

[Hanu]

BeeDeeDubbleU,

Any legit site, (like my main site), can add new pages and get them ranked within a few days. You can see that from the posts above and I am working on another new page right now.

This is how the sb works:

New sites do not rank well because neither their PR nor their anchor text is taking effect immediately. You can still build a link factory but it will take ages until it starts showing in the serps. By that time chances are that you, the spammer (just kidding), has A) given up or B) been caught otherwise.

The drawback is that legit new sites are treated uniformly as potential spammers. They will have to earn their ranking by being patient. G's bet is that a legit site with good and unique content will have the patience to wait (and wade) through the sb.

I don't know if you remember the -aasdasd thingy. For me that made it perfectly clear that there was something fishy going on.

New pages are a completely different story. New pages on non-sb'ed sites rank well. This is because the sb is not an attribute of a page, it's associated with a site and it applies to all pages of a sb'ed site.

As a sidenote: I doubt that buying existing domains is a way of getting around the sb. I myself built a new site on an existing domain a couple of months ago. I removed every old page and put in a completely new set of pages. No old URL remained valid. And guess what? I went straight into the sb. Now my toolbar PR is 5 and I have a nice set of backlinks but I'm out-ranked by crappy, stone-aged sites with virtually no appplicable content and amateurish seo. I'm even outranked by a freakin' PR0 'Links' page that links to me. The only occurrence of the keywords on that page are in the anchor text of that particular link.

[Powdork]

Lothar,
see message 31
see message 55
;)
although that doesn't really count as having press contacts. If you want examples of sandboxed sites, there not hard to find. If you are a member of, say, the chamber of commerce they will have a list of new businesses (or at least ones that joined). They usually give a web address. Check whois for the domains registration date. Then perhaps check the wayback machine. Web Design Companies may have lists of recent work. There are probably some folks around here that have lists of several or more. Perhaps the fine folks at a site like google watch or #*$! could put up a form for us to enter various information about a domain in order to aggregate some statistics. The actual domain could be optional.

[eZeB]

Hanu -- I think there is a new filter or screening where large changes to old stable sites that are focused on increasing keyword density and SEO are penalized. I had the same things happen recently and its the only thing I can think of.

Several other things are goin on right now IMHO -- The rules for cross-linking have definately tightened up, links text is much MORE important, and links from similar themed sites is MORE important. I could be wrong and I know others disagree.

My personal theory is that Google wants everything to be natural (based on comments by Matt Cutts) -- a large number of new links that are all the same suddenly appearing, or a large number of links pointing to a site that just happens to be almost exactly the same as those pointing to another site on the same C-Block -- these are clearly spammers OR attempts to game the system and get penalized.

[elgrande]

Just some more food for thought. . . (eZeB, I just read your post after I initially wrote mine - I agree with you.)

I don't think that it's "new domains" that are getting sandboxed. I am leaning toward the theories on sandboxing of new links (and maybe new optimization efforts).

I have a 3-year-old site that never ranked well in Google for any terms (and it didn't deserve to - very few links and less than 10 pages). I basically didn't update the site for a couple of years. Then around 3 months ago I started adding pages (the site theme stayed the same) and gradually got around 70 PR4+ on-topic links (half reciprocals).

Now it's a 60-page, textbook-optimized (Brett's guide) site with decent backlinks (35% varying anchor text, 20% deeplinks, only 3 from other sites of mine with no crosslinking). The industry is competitive, but no one is competing for my main 2-KW phrase. It ranks #2 in Yahoo and top 10 in the new MSN. However, in Google it is affected by all the symptoms described in this thread. It does bounce around wildly in Google on a daily basis for the 2-KW phrase, ranging from ~#60 to ~#150, but doesn't show up for any other 3 words in the title (or even the full title). I have links from around 25 of the sites ahead of mine for this same 2-KW phrase. None of the other sites ahead of mine have even a single inbound link with this 2-KW phrase, so by normal (albeit old) reasoning, my site is definitely being held back by some kind of dark force ;o)

So. . . the age of the site doesn't appear to be a factor in itself, but rather new links and/or optimization techniques.

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

The drawback is that legit new sites are treated uniformly as potential spammers. They will have to earn their ranking by being patient. G's bet is that a legit site with good and unique content will have the patience to wait (and wade) through the sb.

With all due respect this just does not compute. I am getting hoarse repeating that there is absolutely no logic in keeping ALL new sites out of the SERPs. If this were so then there would have been a release date of say six months. Thousands, possibly millions, of people have had sites sandboxed for up to NINE months!

Do you honestly think that Google or anyone outside the cuckoo's nest would do this deliberately? What are the plans for release? One year? Two years? I don't think so.

Remember that if we consider that the Internet is less than ten years old and growing exponentially then we are talking about perhaps as much as 15% or more of the Internet being hidden by Google. Good corporate policy? I don't think so.

Let's just hope that the media gets involved. As I said earlier this is the only chance we have of learning anything about this. Whenever any theory as controversial as this has happened in the past GoogleGuy has come along and debunked it but not this time. Doesn't that tell you something?

[Hanu]

elgrande,

So. . . the age of the site doesn't appear to be a factor in itself, but rather new links and/or optimization techniques.

I am willing to accept that as it sounds plausible and would largely cause the same symptoms. In fact, me thinks that in a delirium I posted in another thread about how great an idea it would be to crank up the weight of anchor text and at the same time delay the effect of links.

eZeB,

Some people here react allergic to the term penalty. But if by penalty you mean that certain over-optimizations are ignored by the ranking algo, I am with you.

[mark1615]

I keep asking this question when the term gets thrown around but, what is "overoptimization" and what is "spam" in this context. I am not being coy here, but these things really seem to be in the eye of the beholder. I think some of the techniques that people would generally agree are "spam" are highly effective with G in very competitive areas. We see it all the time with competition for terms with 2-8MM sites returned for the term.

So, if the so-called sandbox, is an anti-spam filter it is, um, not effective. Now, all that said, I can also think of a number of sites using what are called "spam" techniques, that are actually good, useful sites and legit businesses. I would guess their owners don't care about the arcane world of the G algo - they just think it is *gasp* advertising. And don't tell that G is about to catch up with them. Some of the more prominent examples have been in their place for 2-3 years or more.