Sandbox is there!

[Nawaralsaadi]

My view is that the sandbox exist, and it is exist mainly for commercial pages, I focus on travel and hotel related websites, and the competition there is really fierce (with 20-40m+! results for my keywords), it seems that the sandbox was introduced in such industries to safeguard the relevancy of search results, in hotel/travel pages you had every day a bunch of new travel sites coming out with recycled inventory from the big players (Travelocity, hotels, expedia..etc), those sites would start a white label affiliation with the majors, full the site with the right key words, add a couple of links, and wait for the money!.

Well I believe the above didn’t work well either for google or for the real business in this industry, hence the sandbox or the credibility test, I believe the 6 months or so wait period is a test period to actually test whether the website owner is a real legitimate business with legitimate results, hence your site will be watched for updates, how many links are being added, how many new pages are being created…etc.

Your site will rank well for the none commercial none competitive words, hence no abuse problem exist under those keywords, yet for the real words you gotta prove that you are worth being presented in the top results.

I don’t think google will be doing the world much harm if they delayed commercial sites from being shown 3 to 6 months, in the end customers will be sure that what they are seeing are real business with a minimum history behind them.

The Sandbox over the long term will discourage spam sites and affiliate sites that are not committed to a long term brand building strategy, not mention for the first few months, those serious sites who don’t show in the results will double their Ad words spending, I guess this is an added bonus for google, but not the real cause behind the sandbox effect.

So bottom line, if you are committed to your online business, just keep working as usual, add links, add pages and content, eventually you will be indexed and probably highly in the results, however if you wait & do nothing till you are out of the sandbox I doubt you will have a high ranking once out; the key is not just to get out of the box, but to go out with a decent ranking, so make the best of this wait period by focusing on your business.

Regards,
Nawar