Has the Sandbox been Abandoned?

[phantombookman]

Sorry to start a new thread but felt it may warrant it.

I have been posting in favour of the Sandbox's existence and I have 2 sites firmly stuck in the sand!

However...
2 weeks ago I registered a brand new domain and started to build a new site. I knew it would be at least 6 months before anything happened but..

This morning it entered the index for the first time - straight on page one for a one word search (a town, granted only 194,000 matches) but none the less the last 2 sites still cannot achieve similar results after 6 months.

Also preliminary early pages ranking very well
The site has only one incoming link, no adsense, banners or anything, vanilla html etc.

Built as per my last 2 sites so clearly something has changed!
Regards and hope to all
Rod

[dvduval]

There is a difference between getting lots of referrals, as Brett says, and ranking highly for competitive keywords on a site that is less than 10 months old.

If anyone has an example of a site on competitive (over 2 million results), commercial keywords that ranks in the top 3, PLEASE PM me with an example. I have a feeling my inbox will be empty!

[claus]

Uhm... i recently launched a new site about two weeks ago (yawn away...)

Thing is - if you think in terms of "primary keywords" it's a two word phrase. There's 32,700,000 (!) competing pages in the SERPS, and the top site has more than 13,000 backlinks, to the front page alone - and all genuine (ie no linkexchange).

Now, here's the point: When reading these threads, doesn't anyone of you think (even remotely) that it would be rather unnatural if any site made it to top 10 in those SERPS in 14 days? Unlikely, even? For that matter even top 100? Or two months? Two years?

Not all SERPS are that hard to get of course, but i think you get my hint anyway.

(I'll get there in a few years or so, but i don't really care about those two word serps anyway - I'm not CNN [searchengineworld.com] you know)

[steveb]

The top ten is clearly not the point. When decently made official sites for people can't rank in the top 200 for their name, that highlights the issue more. Old Google could rank sites like this properly in three months; new Google can't handle the task at all.

[2by4]

<<< Registered a new domain last wednesday morning.
- DNS resolved and site was good-to-go by 10am.
- Threw 25 pages of content on it and adsense.
- Linked to it heavily from a pr6.
- spidered wednesday 11am by google.
- received about 40 referrals wednesday night from Google.
- no referrals on thursday and couldn't find it in the index.
- found it in the index on friday and received 30 referrals.
- could not find it on saturday.
- sunday found it in the index.
- generated about 200 referrals so far.

Sandbox? What's that? :-) >>>

Ok, I'm reading it again, what's your point? Same old same old. New site peaks initially before entering the sandbox, that's old news, there's nothing 'deep' in that. I had that happen too, made a new site, it beat a large IT company with a similar name for 2 weeks in phrases both sites shared, this isn't news, it never came back after that peak. And I did it with a handful of links from low PR sites.

[BillyS]

If anyone has an example of a site on competitive (over 2 million results), commercial keywords that ranks in the top 3, PLEASE PM me with an example. I have a feeling my inbox will be empty!

I rank on a #1 on a key phrase that returns 1.5 million results. To me, competition has nothing to do with it. Frequency of search is everything. It is not a common phrase that people search for, but lots of sites have the phrase in it.

[nzmatt]

How would an algorithm distinguish between a "money" and a "non-money" term? Do you guys reckon there's a hand composed list, one compiled via adwords data or what?

I think the answer to this one is easy, based on search volumes. Any term that is searched frequently can make money for those at the top of the list, regardless of the term. They don't need adwords for help.

...Volumes, Adwords?

Why would Google not have just 'sewn' Adwords keyphrase/average cost per click data into their main search algo?

Money phrase + new website + sanbox filter = Google Adwords advertising = Google/shareholder profit = weaker search results + unhappy webmasters.

How could it be any other way? :)

[edited by: nzmatt at 2:09 am (utc) on Dec. 9, 2004]

[nzmatt]

Hey - what happened there?

[Powdork]

what happened there?

It's usually a case of a missing bracket using the quote function

[nzmatt]

Argh..that's better

[dvduval]

If anyone has an example of a site on competitive (over 2 million results), commercial keywords that ranks in the top 3, PLEASE PM me with an example. I have a feeling my inbox will be empty!

;)

My inbox is still empty :)

[Jesse_Smith]

If anyone has an example of a site on competitive (over 2 million results), commercial keywords that ranks in the top 3, PLEASE PM me with an example. I have a feeling my inbox will be empty!

I'm close, #4 and 5 out of 15,200,000. It's a registered trademark, so yah, it's commercial. er wait, the sites been around since 1996. With my other sites on the same topic, the newer it is, the farther down it is in SERPs. The eight year old site is #3, and 4, and a four year old site is #27.

[dvduval]

Yes, pm me if your site meets the description I gave AND was started since February 2004.

[nzmatt]

Anyone who can do that will be very rich indeed - for more than one reason! You may have to contact them on their superyacht.

[dvduval]

I keep hearing some interesting theories, some black hat and some not, of ways to beat it, but I have yet to see a true to life example.

[jk3210]

In doing a search that has 22 million results, what's the difference between a site that's in the sandbox and a site that ranks number 18,627,001?

IOW what's the difference between a site that's "in the sandbox" and a site that simply has crappy rankings?

And if there is a difference, how can you tell?