New Article - Two Sides Of The Sandbox – Getting Stuck And Unstuck On Google

[thejenn]

Authored by: Jim Hedger

Full Text: http://www.searchengineguide.com/hedger/008618.html

A Snippet:

The term, "sandbox" describes a process of Google's ranking formulas that appear to slow the debut of new sites in the Top10 listings. Whether or not the sandbox exists tends to depend on the side of the black hat / white hat debate one comes from. SEOs dedicated to "pure", non-spammy SEO tend to downplay the effects of the sandbox while those who use dark-art tactics know from personal experience that the effects are very real.

[Audrey]

Great article. The site I've been working on is just over 6 months old. For the first 6 months, I was in the top ten on both Yahoo and MSN. It was not until the last couple of weeks that Google finally ranked me higher than 300 LOL.

Audrey

[Jill]

That's quite a broad brush to say that white hat SEOs don't think that there's a sandbox.

We at the High Rankings forum know for sure it exists (as an aging/trust delay), and I'm pretty sure we are usually classified as "white hat" even though we don't particularly care for the term.

[Big Bill]

I'd say myself that the sandbox can be defined as the period of time between when Google first becomes aware of your site and its becoming satisfied as to your site's provenance. "Google Provenance" is what I call it. What will establish that is usually a whole bunch of links from what Google regards as reputable authoritative sources. If you can get them in a day you'll be out of the sandbox in a day. Usually though it takes longer than that to get responses that aren't obviously bought and paid for as opposed to earned through what Google perceives as a natural process of discovery so several months or more of appearing to being plain old ignored is more often the case.

Mine's a ten-gallon hat, by the way. Yee-haw!

BB

[TheIntroducer]

One thing I find quite interesting nowadays is just how different the search engine's algorythms are. One of a day they were similar, but now Google seems to dramaticlly different. I think that since earlier this year it seems to weight URL names more importantly and also gives much more weight to relevance links (e.g. a loan site linking to a loan site, gets far more 'score')