December 26, 2009
When I first heard the term “Google Sandbox” from my friend, Yan who had just started niche marketing that was about 9 months ago. He explained that some of his niche sites were still in “probation” after getting the dreaded Google Sandbox for ranking too fast in too short a time. Well that was something new I learned then as I had always thought you get to rank well because of your hard work in backlink building. Why should one be made to lose his search engine ranking for doing the right thing?
Well fast forward to today, 9 months later, I can now say, though not too proudly, I not only heard about Google Sandbox, I experienced it too. 3 of my micro niche adsense sites had it with one being “released” just about 3 weeks ago.
The Google Sandbox is a term used to describe Google’s filtering process that affects most new websites by placing them on a “probation” status. Google seems to especially target those that get to its SERP too quickly too soon.
There is no official definition and I read many different explanations and opinions given by many people who may have experienced it as well. BTW I have not read any statements from Google confirming or rejecting the existence of Google Sandbox.
Well a penalty is something given by Google if you contravene any of its TOS, or whatever rules and guidelines that have been clearly spelled out for you to comply with. Google Sandbox seems to be given to new sites who rank too well in the search engines or domains that might have changed owners too frequently. It’s probably Google’s way of telling us it prefers natural link building from all websites. However I like to think this Google Sandbox may have been Google’s answer to lots of spammers who were till recent years able to game the system and pretty much got away scot-free.
If you have been following my Google Micro Niche Adsense journey, you would know I now own 7 domains. My very first website moved to Google’s page 1 #1 position a few days after getting indexed. All I did was using Angela’s Backlink Building Program and article marketing. It stayed on #1 for about a week till it disappeared completely. Its “probation” period lasted for about 2 months and now it’s back on Google’s #1 position. Two other newer sites with positions in #1 and #3 have now gone into Google Sandbox.
Backlink building and more backlink building. Yup! that’s what I hear everyone recommending when I was researching what others were doing. Well I probably didn’t do enough of that since it took me a whole 2 months to get out of my probation period. The benefit of continuing to do backlinking is that when you get out of the sandbox you are in a better position to rank even higher than before. Some people believe how long you stayed in the sandbox depends on your popularity link so getting more backlinks to your new site must surely mean a lot.
Also do you know that Google has openly said through Matt Cutts that having backlinks is more important than having a ton of great contents and that determines which sites get crawled too. I saw a recent video in which he says that Google will ignore such sites unless it has a good number of backlinks to your site.
This is not de-indexing and all your pages continue to be indexed by Google. So this means that you will continue to see your website url when you type “site:www.domain”. Another test you should try to do is go to Yahoo instead of Google and search for the term “linkdomain:” followed by your website url. Your backlinks that you had accumulated will continue to be shown here.
If you are still unsure if you’ve got de-indexed by Google instead you can conduct a quick test this time using Google. Go to any of your web pages and copy part or complete sentence and place the whole text i.e place “your text” in Google search bar and click “”Search”. If Google returns with your selected text it shows that your website has not been de-indexed. Yeah you just got the sandbox, that’s a lot better
I’ve learned to live with it and that’s the same recommendation I will give to whoever is asking how not to get into this temporary setback in terms of your search engine ranking. Like I mentioned I just used the limbo phase to do my backlinking tasks.
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Filed under Link Management, Search Engine Optimization, Work From Home, seo-tips