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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
Yes, I have managed to rank many new pages in highly seo'd fields.
The secret is: slowing acquiring one way links over a period of time. Also, a small recip link trading schedule has been established...etc etc etc
JuniorOptimizer, why do you need to do all this if there is no sandbox? Surely you don't employ these techniques for older established sites!
And of course it is new domains/websites, rather than "new pages", that are sandboxed for money terms.
Yes, I have managed to rank many new pages in highly seo'd fields.
The secret is: slowing acquiring one way links over a period of time. Also, a small recip link trading schedule has been established...etc etc etc
All ground breaking stuff, eh?
[google.com...]
It doesn’t anymore, and it should. That’s the problem with this thing.
I view the problem as not being me or google, but all those stupid Rhode Island widget dealers who do not come list in my directory.
I just launched a site this month...brand new domain name, clean HTML, nothing spammy, quality content, yadda yadda. Time to start counting the days I guess.
An interesting note: I have a blog that I post in regularly. It's not something I try to get ranked under any phrases, it's just something to do when I'm bored or feel like writing. The content, if I wanted to market it, would be highly competitive however. Anyways...to experiment I added an three word phrase to the blog title and wrote a short, nonsense post using said keyword twice. One week later it's number one in google for that three word phrase.
The blog itself is about three months old - it has no incoming links.
Right now I see google as the bully of search engines and I'm tired of it.
No answer there suggests niche terms. I am currently placing top 10 for niche terms in a sandboxed site, those results come in a normal time frame after I add that content, 1-2 weeks. It looks to me like the sandbox is not applying to terms with less than 100,000 results returned. Has anyone seen anything different, or can anyone pinpoint an upper limit for serps returned for keyword phrase x or y?
That's for a brand new, no 301 domain; new pages on a 301 domain seem to be treated differently than the old pages from what I can see. Has anyone seen any patterns in how new pages are treated in a brand new domain?
-added: oh, I rechecked, my highest search term returns #5 out of 250,000 serps. That's on a page added after site is sandboxed. This domain has a 301 from an old domain, so it's not a perfect example of the sandbox. All its older pages, existing before the sandbox, and the search terms they targetted, successfully, are in the sandbox as far as I can tell.
To some degree yes, I've seen them catch over-optimization, which is not a bad thing. But for the rest, I'm not talking about blocking spam here, I'm talking about what is increasingly starting to look like a fundamental breakdown. Blocking almost all new sites from the web for this long is a breakdown. This isn't 'getting better at detecting seo techniques', it's blocking all new sites, that's like getting better at driving by turning off the car and parking it in the driveway. If they were getting better, then spammy sites wouldn't get in, but real sites would. And I wouldn't be seeing directories in top 3 positions more often than not...
What Microsoft wouldn't pay to get the kind of loving treatment google gets from even the people it's hurting, how do they keep doing it? Is it the cute company name? Is it the company slogan?
One of my sites used to appear on page 1 with other relevant sites for certain key phrases. Now it seems there are a couple of these sites per page of SERPs mixed in with wildly off-topic sites.
This might not be the case in all sectors, but there's lots of 'noise' breaking up the good results of days gone by.
Can someone tell me how to check if my site is in the sandbox?Is the domain name new. If so, the answer is yes.
Not quite, is the domain name new, are you targetting competitive keywords? Then the answer is yes. What would be interesting is if everyone here pooled together what they see to determine how many serp results constitute a competitive keyword. 100,000, 200,000? What's the highest count anyone has seen rank consistently with a new sandboxed site they've put up?
New sites targetting niche terms, non-competetive terms, don't seem to have any particular sandbox affect, which is also revealing I think.
figment88, I take your point - and it's not your fault google choose to list you at number one.
But "all those stupid Rhode Island widget dealers" couldn't possibly list in your directory and the zillion and one other directories now out there.
They could and do appear in Google however - but on page 142 of returned results despite providing far more relevant information than your directory with no listings.
If I search Google for results I don't expect to be directed to a directory / minor search engine with no relevant results. And yet this happens time after time.
Not quite, is the domain name new, are you targetting competitive keywords? Then the answer is yes.
2by4 I am not sure that this is correct. A couple of months ago I did a non-commercial site for a lawn bowling club (I think I am OK to say this? It's not a commercial organisation.)
I don't think we would put lawn bowling in the competitive arena and a search for "lawn bowling location" Google yields only 50,500 results. My site appears in position 228. The same search on Google UK yields only 7,380 results and my site is in position 53. To me this would indicate that it is sandboxed even though it is non-commercial and it targets non competitive keywords. If I do a search for the actual club name, "widget1 stopword widget2 bowling club", miracle of miracles, it appears in position 3 with results from an obscure directory holding the top two positions.
What I am saying is that I don't think the sandbox is smart enough to filter at the level you suggest.
