How to tell if you may be in the sandbox...

1. The site is on a new domain and less than about 1 year old
2. The keywords you are trying to rank on are considered competitive.
3. Most of the pages of the site has been indexed by Google.
4. The site ranks well for its' competitive keywords in Yahoo and MSN
5. The site ranks well for the non-competitive keywords on Google.
6. The Googlebot visits and crawls the site on a regular basis.
7. The site ranks well for an allinanchor:"your keywords" search.
8. The site has a decent number of unique IBL's and an OK PR
9. The site does not have anything known to cause a ban or penalty.
10. The site has decent SEO
11. The site does not rank in the top 300-400 for it's main keyword.

If your site does not have all 11 things I listed above, then you just rank poorly.

Stop asking about the sandbox and Get back to work!

Dave

Very concise post. And very accurate.

Great post. All the above 11 points are very important. If any one point is missing, then there are chances of entering your site in sandbox. So concentrate on above points.

Hmmm. so is it the sandbox if I was on the sixth page, then somehow found myself at #1 overall, then dropped off the map entirely, and now gravitated again to the first page? All this without doing any work at all! I'm confused...

seems very accurate

One of my pages was recently sandboxed. It has a decent pr, about 600 backlinks, and used to be on the first page of google for two sweet keywords, and ranked at 40-50 for a couple of others. The only keyword you can find my page with now is the domain name, and that is a non-competitive keyword.

What can I say, it sucks.

Spot on.
When I first read that post I thought, "This idiot doesn't know what he's talking about." Re-read the bottom line.

If your site does not have all 11 things I listed above, then you just rank poorly.

Turns out I'm the idiot who can't read.
Very well done. I have one site that this describes perfectly. Site is only 3 months old so it will get there.
newbies should bookmark that post and read it weekly.

LOL - I did the exact same thing!

Nice post Dave. Take a bow

Thanx all!

Having another thread to point folks to when the question comes up will hopefully help.

Dave

<bump>
So I can find it

Dave

I'm glad you found it helpful Cthirty.

Welcome! Please feel free to introduce yourself and tell us a bit about you in the Introductions Forum.

Dave

Is what we call sandbox the time a website gets enough value-age to appear in the result pages? Why should it take one year, why new domains or recently SEOed pages?

I think there is no such thing. IMO if you can't find yourself in the results pages is because your website has not yet what is required to figure there and its lost somewhere between the other pages that have the keyword in their body text, inbound links or titles, but don't deserve to be mentioned in the SERPS yet.

Search in example for the keyword: "work at home". It has 1.6 billion of results. Google only shows 920. Is what we call the sandbox the time we get to "tell" Google our website is better than the other 1.59 billion of sites lost outside the result pages?. Even if you think your website has a better on-page optimization than most of the websites that actually appear in the results pages, I think there are other things to consider:

Your website has been recently SEOed and the keywords in your website are "new" to Google. Why think you should instantly appear in the results? I have seen it happening only for reputable sites.

Your keywords are fairly competitive and you just need to wait a little or get links, but it doesn't mean that exists a pre-determined period of time in which your website won't be able to rank for that keywords.

When the keyword you are trying to rank for appear in millions or even billions of pages google needs more clues to know if your website is really related to that keyword, and not just appear in the text by coincidence.

According to this, getting a very good link will make it appear. I have seen that happen before, so I am a little confused about this sandbox thing. Thoughts?

According the Matt Cutts there is no such thing as a Google sandbox, but there are a few factors in the algorithm that make people think they are in the sandbox.

IMO get more and more of the best anchor text links that you can and forget about the sandbox.

Excellent post Dave.

One thing I would add to this is that I believe the sandbox is not as simple as 'in' or 'out'.

There are many levels.............. (trippy eh?)

The one mistake I made was once I started to appear, I thought my 'poor' results were due to bad seo and started 'playing' (to my detriment). In fact they were due to Google extending my sandbox leash, rather than letting me off it.

After my domain was registered for 2 years, then I really started see my true seo worth.

So in other words, if you see an improvement, don't assume you're out of the 'box', just consider where you feel you should be and consider any changes carefully before completely ripping down your site and starting again or employing Mr $500 a month seo man.

We all know where we think we should be (being modest, of course). If you don't think you're there, then that good old sandboox could still be hanging around.

In which case, Inbound links, Inbound links, Inbound links! (quality ones though.....)

One of my site is in sandbox it seems, my site is only 2 month old. I shall work hard.

Phil: I stickied this post because I felt it was something everyone should see. Obviously, if you disapprove, you can unsticky it.

Excellent post well worth the stickyness!

I think my site http://www.algarvepropertydatabase.com meets all the criterea, not so sure about point 10.

In point 1 you say about one year. My site will be one year old on the 11th November. Does anyone have any experience of release from the so called sandbox. Should I expect a gradual increase in position over time or will i wake up one day be on the first page. Heres hoping!

Hi Dave,

You had put the details nicely. Hope lot of the users got benefited.

D Sarathy.
RankQuest

One other thing that might be worth mentioning, is the reason for the sandbox. In my opinion it is to 'filter' sites that aren't trustworthy, or haven't gained enough credibilty to be listed in the Google serps.

With my second site (that is promoting a retail outlet), I made sure that my address was clearly on the site, and I posted to Dmoz in the local category as a retailer with a store. I did have a little bit of 'sandbox', but with a few quality IBL's, things were far better than I could have imagined and far easier that my previous endeavour.

Whilst not all sites want to post address details, I think this will aid any 'sandbox' problems anyone has due to the fact that you can be reached, and any prospective client can visit and go 'face to face' with the company, so to speak.

After all, if there is a sanbox, I can't think of any other reason why Google would put it in place.........

Anyone agree / disagree?

This worked for me.

I'm a believer in the sandbox theory, regarless of what Matt Cutts has to say about it. However, I don't believe you're in the sandbox for a year before you see any PR in your Google Toolbar.

It took about 3 months for my OCSEOExpert.com blog to go from PR0 to PR3. Look at my first post dated April 6th, 2006. The site is 7 months old now and has a comfortable PR4. I'm in the first 10 results of Google for "seo expert blog" #2 on MSN, and #30 on Yahoo!

So then I built my Top10SSEOTips.com site to test my sandbox theory. Sure enough, for "top 10 seo tips" I'm number 1 in MSN, 2 in Yahoo! and absolutely nowhere in Google (but all pages are indexed in Google).

So that you don't think my ranking is just because of my domain name, I also hold several top 10 positions in MSN for terms like "seo ebook" and "seo expert tips". Dropped from the 8th position on "seo software", but was on there for awhile. So take URL off your "get to the top quick" list and read on...

After one month of seeing where I stood "organically" and NOT showing up in Google (yes, I did sitemap HTML & XML), I decided to start a link development campaign.

I'm not a comfortable Link Exchanger, but I was doing an experiment so I can sleep well with my strategy. I opened up Arelis and acquired several RELEVANT links to my site. Then I invested in a few "pay to play directories" (Paid Inclusion). These sites get crawled daily.

Now well over two months old, the site remains in Google's sandbox. I know my SEO is near perfect because MSN has me at #1 for "top 10 seo tips" and in the top 10 for other terms. I know my SEM is improving and that my pages are indexed in Google.

Nobody owned the domain before me (check the Way Back Machine) and I haven't used any Black Hat techniques to get IBL's. So you tell me, how is it that I can get a PR3 in 3 months for one site, and then be penalized in Google for another using the exact same best practices?

Steve Wiideman = The Guy With a Google Dartboard at His Desk

The simple answer is that of the three search engines you mentioned, Google always requires more links for good rankings.

How many links does the top competition in Google have for those terms?

I agree that there isn't a sandbox as such, but there is a system that makes it appear as though there is a sandbox, and I'm happy calling it the sandbox.

This is all my opinion:-

The sandbox is all, or mostly, about confidence in links pointing to a site. When a site is new, the links that point to it have to gain some trustability, and, unless they already have a good deal of trustability, then the site must wait until the links have 'matured'.

The way I see it is that links to a new site are not stored in the short index, where links are normally stored, so they don't count when Google processes a search query. That's why new sites can't rank highly for competitive searchterms - because only the short index is used to get the results set for competitive searchterms. It's also why new sites can rank highly for non-competitive searchterms - because the long index is dipped into for the results, and the new sites' content is in there.

All of that is just the way I see it.

That fits in well with what I have seen.. It's also why I tend to call it the sandbox effect.. It seems to keep the more rabid 'there is no sandbox' (I feel like I'm in the Matrix) people at bay..

But the "effect" does in fact exist. Which is where the 'there is no sandbox' people seem to come up short. Hell even Matt stated there were filters which when triggered, gave an impression of a 'sandbox'.

Good job. Thanks a lot

Thanks Phil - I had to read this paragraph a few times to grasp the concept of what you're saying.

So basically you're saying that Google has a "Meet the Fockers" Circle of Trust that you cannot under any circumstances enter into until your site and the incoming links mature. Am I following you?

Unbelievable. So now I not only have to worry about "link aging" but I also have to worry about "link maturity", wonderful.

That being the case, how is it that stevewiideman.com slipped from #2 on Google for "orange county seo expert", when I've been driving a slow and steady link development campaign specifically targeting that search term, and my competitor has a 0 IBL's with "orange county seo expert" in the link text? Must be a PageRank competition, since I lose in that battle. Ideas?

Thanks for the FANTASTIC insight. I'm truly enlightened as usual.

All, I don't know who invented the "sandbox" name, but I think we should allow Phil to name his Circle of Trust in Google (for link and site maturity). Agreed?

All the Best,
Steve

The ageing and maturing of links are the same thing. I've no idea what measure they use to decide that it's time for a new site to be treated as a normal site. It may be when both site and links have existed for a certain amount of time, or it may be the age of the site, or of the links. Whatever they use, there has to come a time when the new site and the links pointing to it are treated normally. Links could mature through the length of time they exist, or through the length of time that the new site they point to exists, or both.

Q: how do u think google consider links from sandboxed pages?(links with text of the sandboxed phrase)
btw, ppl talk about sandboxed pages, BUT its no that, its the page+specific phrases...