Forum Moderators: open
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
Can someone tell me how to check if my site is in the sandbox? Thanks.
The method I use is to check out the relationship for an allinanchor search and the standard search.
In the areas I check to results are very similar, sometimes almost identical. Whatever the results you'll get a feel as to where your site should roughly be for a given term.
If you're there great if you are disproportionately further away for a new site then (presuming no other penalties) you are sandboxed
Regards
Rod
i'm afraid that you cannot conclude this. the returned number results from the second search which includes the secondary (sandbox) index. so the threshold with just the main index is still hidden.
I have no idea what fields you guys are competing in, but the ones I work on are 25 million plus.
Almost all the incoming links are on seperate class C IP addresses and total over 1,000. No sitewides or anything crazy like that. The domain was registered in March.
One day someone on WebmasterWorld announced the "sandbox is over" and I checked and the site was sitting there in 2nd place. It hasn't budged since.
If you can guess the phrase I'm talking about you can hit Google and confirm what I'm saying. But I don't plan on getting anymore specific because I don't need the competition.
I guarantee you many people here have ranked sites that are registered since March, they just don't see any need to tout it.
I will agree that it's a lot easier to rank an older domain, and I suggest doing that. If you absolutely have to rank now, get an old domain and go to town. Hopefully I haven't insulted anyone with this post and this should serve as some inspiration to anyone who's still afraid of "Old Nessie".
How long did this process take? From first linking to new domain name to #2? Given a natural link development with 1000 links, that would have to be at least a few months, no?
The separate IP addresses is a no brainer, it never fails to amaze me when people use those cheesy virtual hosting companies that put all the sites on one IP.
"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"
The non-sandboxed terms were much less than 50000 for the site I'm referring to. We might be able to figure out the actual cutoff for that, for a 5000 return keyword phrase, 2 words, it went to number one and stayed there, no big achievement but it didn't get sandboxed.
What I'm interested in is seeing if we can find the actual cutoff numbers, the numbers I put out there are just rough guesses, does anyone else see different numbers?
By the way, I've never had a doubt that the sandbox filters can themselves be manipulated, it's just a question of how to do that.
"the returned number results from the second search which includes the secondary (sandbox) index. so the threshold with just the main index is still hidden. "
Good point, thanks for reminding me of that.
[edited by: 2by4 at 6:15 pm (utc) on Dec. 10, 2004]
One.
I've seen the sandbox effect for as few as six results. Less competition and less numbers just make everything easier always.
There is no question that a large number of sandboxed sites were let in during May.
I agree with this 100%.
I had a site come out of the sandbox at that time and it is still out of the sandbox. I also have a few sites launched after that time that are still in the sandbox.
There are some people that say there is a special way of getting sites out of the sandbox - I do not agree with this. As I said, I did have a site come out of the sandbox and can say that there was nothing special or different that I did to that site as opposed to sites that are still sandboxed.
The links have effect as we rank very high for allinanchor, and for the rest of the commands. Without any credit for these links I wonder how that can happen, (perhaps someone knows?)
These sites have had links, from old sites with good PR, for going on 10 months. How much “age” do you need?
Nothing fantastic I know and we'll see how long it lasts.
Inidentally, site launched in April has been top three since it almost began for 1,170,000 result search term.
So Sandbox cut off - if it exists - cannot be set in stone.
that's the new site boost, don't get too excited. I got that boost too, it was very funny, I was beating a huge software company just because we shared part of our name, took me a while to figure out where the traffic came from, once the new site boost faded after 2 weeks I never got those serps back, even after about 9-10 months, nor should I have.
It sounds just possible that your site launched in april may have just squeaked in under the may cleaning people are reporting.
I'm curious to see if anyone has gotten a site launched this summer out of the sandbox for serps > 500,000 - 1,000,000. And if so, how long that took. Junioroptimizer seems to have done this. What was the launch date? When did you start getting your top 10 for your competitive phrases?
I got a #1 for a 4 word phrase that has 1.4 million. I don't get any traffic from it though.
Honestly, I dont think search results have anything to do with it. Search volume does.
The one main factor they all had in common was they all had links to other pages with the keyword in the anchor text.
The other main factor they all had was the keyword was in their anchor text in incoming links to that page. No-Brainer.
Not all of them had the keyword in their title. But most did. So it looks like the title isn't that important.
The search I did had 146,000,000 results. The page rank didn't seem to make much difference in the ranking. Below is the order of page rank.
1.PR6
2.PR7
3.Pr8
4.pr5
5.pr7
6.pr6
7.pr6
8.pr5
9.pr7
10.PR6
It looks like google is only counting the page rank of the links pointing to the page rather than counting the actual page rank of the page itself. That explains why a PR5 can rank higher than a PR7.
I think google is devaluing basic SEO and maybe sandboxing it? It looks like text only is working better than before.
Plus anchor text in outgoing links from the page is helping too. So if your page is about widgets then you should have links to internal or external pages about "widgets" and "blue widgets" and "red widgets" etc...
Theme pages are ranking well.
I have built a new site based on this and I will let you know if it get's sandboxed or not.
I'm getting REAL frustrated with this. Look, all I want is for my site to be in Google's serps so people can see my hard work. What's so bad about that? If anything, Google should dump 90% of their serps because most of them haven't been updated since the mid-90s!
This is unfair. I know the SEO world does not play a fair game, but what about those of us who do not want to do the PPC thing?
Argh!
You won't feel frustrated if you accept that this is a main index capacity problem. Google is working hard to solve the problem. Unfortunately it is proving very difficult. If you accept this, then the situation is only temporary - a long temporary - situation.
By the way, the sandbox has been extended to new pages on old sites. When Google announced their index to have been expanded to 8B, most of the added pages of old sites do not appear in the main index. And they exhibit the sandbox symptoms!
In the meantime, I suggest you concentrate on Yahoo/MSN and Google will come when Google comes!
