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

[DerekH]

randle wrote

The sandbox has absolutely tortured us. Older sites do better and better, but new ones prove quite challenging.

Not in my case. Not at all...
Older sites spidered once every week, newer sites most days.

DerekH

[dickbaker]

I have a site with about 1400 to 1500 pages on it. I submitted it on June 14th.

Google only visited a hundred or two times each month from June through early September. Then the Gbot started coming around more often. So far this month, it's crawled 2,991 times.

Near as I can tell, every page is in the index. For the 13 main keyphrases I'm trying to rank for, the site is #25 for one keyphrase, #52 for another, #94 for another, and all the way up to #291 for the others.

By point of contrast, I have another site on the same topic that's been online for 2 1/2 years. It ranks from #1 to #8 for the very same keyphrases.

[Powdork]

Not in my case. Not at all...
Older sites spidered once every week, newer sites most days.

It's true. My sandboxed site gets spidered constantly. If only I could sell some advertising to those pesky spiders.
Does anyone have a
1. Site placed on a brand new (never registered before) domain
2. That was launched after May
3. Doing well on google.com
4. for a phrase that is competitive on google.com

If so could you share whether
1. It has a dmoz listing and whether that listing has migrated to the G directory.
2. Has a Y! Directory listing.
3. Has aggressively gotten a large volume of backlinks.

I know people are loathe to do this, but if you could sticky me a url.

[cbpayne]

I was not a huge fan of the sandbox theory as many sites I looked at that claimed to be sandboxed, just ranked poorly (and they deserved to). BUT, BUT, I put a new site up 3 months ago and its well and truely sandboxed (and it uses adsense!)

Here are the numbers:
- new domain prevously un-registered - 4 months old
- got PR2 in last update (site only had few links at time of update) - should be >PR5 now.
- moderativly competitve term - 'Widgets'
- site called 'Widgets Arena'
- ranks number one for 'Widgets Arena' (no one else has this name) and a couple of other non searched for terms
- listed in DMOZ and many other directories (not Yahoo)
- >150 links (other than DMOZ clones), many with PR>4
- 50 or so of the links are on topic
- ranks number one for allinanchor:widgets
- all my experience tells me it should rank 2nd or 3rd for Widgets
- NOT RANKED IN FIRST 1000!

If thats an effect of the sandbox, what is?

<added> - just seen Powdorks reply.
-Googebot on the site every day for lengthy periods of time
-site did migrate from DMOZ to Google Directory, but then Google directory reverted to earlier version

[dvduval]

I have managed to get one site out of the sandbox using a combination of:
1) Lots of internal pages and links
2) Multiple Links from a handful of other sites (ex. 100 links from one site)
3) Lots of single links from a large variety of domains

1 and 2 got me into the top 10 and 3 took me to #1

This is on a phrase that has 494,000 results, so not exactly a big phrase, but certainly not terribly obscure either. This site was first indexed in March.

For other sites, I am not getting sandboxed on MSNs new engine due out in January, and I have turned off most of my Google Adwords accounts, because I believe I will get nearly as much in traffic for free from MSN than I will from Google for money.

I am even thinking about advertising MSNs new search on some of my sites, so long as the Google sandbox continues to affect me, because I feel I have created some very worthwhile sites, without doing any black hat tricks, and I want users to be encouraged to use MSN in addition to Google, because they both have value to the searcher.

[Iguana]

I just gave up and put the most important set of pages on one of my older sites (same theme but a different angle) and whoooosh from #100+ to #1 on most of the pages moved.

I thought it might be because my new domain didn't have DMOZ entries but reading above I can see that this isn't that likely. I still have 2 old domains I haven't done much with so I can introduce 2 new sites with them. The other thing is that geocities.com has been around a long time and a free site there shouldn't get any sandboxed affect (depends on the area you work in as to whether this is acceptable).

[JudgeJeffries]

A question that I do find interesting is, if the sandboxed sites are ever released, is what effect will they have on the current serps. It seems that a tidal wave will sweep over over with totally unknown outcome.

[scoreman]

hello guys. I started a website back in May (stand alone site with no backlinks from any other source) and it was in Google within a month. I was getting gbot throughout that time but it wasnt showing. A few months later, I started another 10 sites at once. This time they were showing in the serps within two weeks. The sites have been getting continually fully indexed every 2 weeks... I dont believe the sandbox effect has taken place in any of my sites for longer than a month. And once the gbot comes, it keeps coming back about once a week.

[dvduval]

scoreman, in your post you seem to be only speaking of getting indexed, but not about how you rank for important key phrases and the competitiveness of those phrases.

[Vec_One]

Yes, there seems to be widespread confusion about this particular phenomenon. Just to clarify, as I understand it, the sandbox does not affect indexing, PR, or crawling frequency. It just affects ranking for the more competitive terms.

Are your search terms very competitive Scoreman?

[fjpapaleo]

I have a pr6 site with over 60,000 pages "indexed" since May. Plenty of back-links. Lots of content, anchor text and all "white hat". Trust me, there's a sandbox. Or more accurately, a supplemental index.

[Powdork]

I just gave up and put the most important set of pages on one of my older sites (same theme but a different angle) and whoooosh from #100+ to #1 on most of the pages moved.

That says a lot. Mine is the opposite story. I moved a subdirectory from an old domain to a new one. The pages had many #1 positions while on the old domain. They have been on the new domain for six months now. I have added more links since the move than were there before the move and all the old links should follow the 301s.

Content is king? No, on Google content means zero.

[Teshka]

Out of about 8 sites I've launched since May, I've only got one that I don't think has been sandboxed. I started it in early August and it's grown steadily in traffic. It ranks from the 20s to 70s for a couple dozen keywords in a quite competitive (and lucrative to Adsense publishers) field. Although this is a far cry from number #1, the way that it has just been steadily climbing gives me hope of getting up in those top results.

Some interesting things about it...

It's a blog (industry specific)

The site doesn't have its own domain name; it's just under a folder on my typepad account.

It has tons of outgoing links

I post 2-3 times a week

Other than submitting to Yahoo (accepted almost instantly) and the DMOZ (thus far ignored), I've never hunted for links (I recently got a freebie link from a blog off a PR 8 site though).

It went from PR 0 to 5 in the last update

It's already making $10-15 day

Considering the other sites that I've been promoting hardcore have been buried in the sand (and haven't gotten--IMO--the PR they deserve), I'm considering taking a page from the above book and just buying my way into the Yahoo Directory and forgetting about link exchanges.

[Broadway]

I tried to start a "sandbox" thread a week or two ago and it got nixed by the higher powers here at WebmasterWorld. I'm glad this one got through.

I see GoogleGuy comments posted on some fluff Google threads. Clearly he reads everything. It'd be nice to have some sort of statement from Google regarding this topic. If nothing else an actual reason (other than forcing the use of AdWords) for the existence of this Sandbox effect.

[Powdork]

Teshka before spending 7*$299 you may want to consider that the most likely reason for your blog's success is that it resides in a folder of a non sandboxed site, not the Y! listing.