Google Sandbox FAQ

how to indicate whether you are still inside the sandbox or not? pagerank?

 

Google the keywords you're trying to rank for. If you're not found in the first 5 pages, you're likely to still be in the sandbox.

 

Thankyou for the informations..

 

Thanks for the origanal post. I hate the sandbox as I have to spend to much time there.

 

All good info to know, but that doesn't explain why my site, www.hongkonghotel.com ranks well for 'hong kong hotel' in google.com.sg, google.de, google.co.uk but not google.com US index. Could it be that the sandbox only applies to the US index. Can anybody shed any light on this for me?

 

nice inforamtion mate maybe my sites are in the sandbox.

 

first 5 pages that's only 50 different sites, some keywords may well have 10000 sites competing for them.

 

Thank for share idea. Sandbox is the google secret they have not shown any document. 9 month is too long, some site take 2-3 month and go out sandbox. Just increase back link and add quanlity content. Finally, we will got the high pr web site and ranking.

 

Interesting how sandbox affects PR or it doesnt?

 

I'm in the sandbox for a website ranked high on Bing and Yahoo (40 terms ranking in the top-10 for major keywords) ZERO for Google. That's a penalty. That's the sandbox and I hate it.

I even know managers and one director at Google (enterprise accounts) and they can't help out, so it's just the way the algorythm works for sites that start to do too well (too many backlinks too fast - too much traffic for a new site - too many changes - etc) too quickly.

I'm in the Sandbox just about 10 months now, I hope I don't have to wait another year, that will kill me. I'm having to spend $4,000/month on Adwords to keep traffic up to we can get sales. Look forward to the day when we can compete on the search engines.

 

Delete the site??? Is this the only way out of the sandbox??

 

this information is very use full for all those persons who make its own website seo thanks for the main giving points

 

@aaron,

i just bought an expired domain which is currently sandboxed - we'll call it sandboxed.com.

i went to get sandboxed.com out of the sandbox and to start ranking sooner than the typically supposed 6-9 months.

can/should i buy a stronger domain - call it pr3.com - and then have that redirected to sandboxed.com. will that get me out of the sandbox? any insight is greatly appreciated.

thank you in advance.

 

I have had commercial sites since the late 1990s and it was no problem at all to set up a new IM site as a sideline and it go straight to page 1.
I have noticed a few things about this gradual delaying of indexing sites by Google.
I have noticed that if you have a domain name that IS the KW, then it will almost certainly be at #1 for that keyword. What is more, it seems to stay there. I know this because I also have numerous affiliate businesses and websites. I experimented with one that I had prior knowledge. I already knew the domain name that the business owner was going to use, so I set up a mirror site using .net suffix.
The site went to, and still is at, #2 in Google for the keyword because it is the domain name. Ironically, my site ranks higher than the .com original because I have more relative backlinks!!
As far as sandboxing is concerned, Google will never confirm this, however, a bit of deduction will confirm it.
As the original, and excellent, poster stated; just type the following into the search box:- allinurl:"keyword" and check the results to see if your web address is listed. If you cant find it after page 10 you are almost certainly `sandboxed`.
I can tell you from my connections at various companies that deal with Google at high levels that they did this primarily to deal with the proliferation of crappy one-page adsense sites that were up one day and gone the next. They felt that this devalued the search results and we all know that this is Google`s raison d'être.
I agree with the original post also, that they primarily use the keywords to determine which sites to sandbox. There is a logical reason for this.
If a keyword has massive search volume, Google want it to be accurate, because they want searchers to find what they want, particularly if it is an adsense or adwords related search. Simply, they make more money from accurate search results. Conversely, if a keyword has hardly any searches, it is not significant `commercially`for them to worry about, so that way it is likely that you will escape being sandboxed. It is basically a way for them to protect their commercial interests!
Google also feel that they are obliged to try and make SERPs a level playing field so they will penalize anybody, large or small companies, who try to game the system, i.e. backlinks; plagiarism; the list is endless.
I have even tried using aged domains, but they still seem to spend time before they appear, so it is up to you whether you want to spend money on them.
A word of caution about aged domains. If you park them on GoDaddy, Google have started to strip the PR from them. To avoid this, you will need to have them hosted somewhere. They do not need to have a website on them as long as they are hosted and have an index page! I am sure that all the other parked domain companies will see this happen soon, so you have been warned!
I do not want to ramble on any more, so I will give this advice.
Buy or register a domain that IS the KW of a niche.
Set up a WP blog and put some crappy personal stuff on it as long as it is original. Bookmark every time you add any personal articles. Link to them via Web 2.0 sites like Squidoo, Digg, Hub Pages etc. Tweet them. Post them on Facebook.
Leave it for about 4 weeks until you see the site consistently in the rankings for your keyword(s).
Then, and only then, you can scrap all the crap and start with all your plugins. I will not go through them all here, I am sure you all know them anyway. You can then promote your site in the normal way without fear of Google.
I have found that once you have established that you are not a spoof site, they will index you permanently and forget about you.

 

>Then, and only then, you can scrap all the crap and start with all your plugins. I will not go through them all here, I am sure you all know them anyway.

I'd love to see a list of the ones you consider worth using, the post u made above was one of the best recent ones i've read.

 

Thanks for the compliment. I wasnt expecting to have to come back here, but as you have asked.
Assuming you are using WordPress the first one I use is All-in-one-Seo. This is a must.
Google XML Sitemaps. This is necessary to help Googlebot to navigate and find your pages. Without this, it is easy for it to miss loads of pages etc. If there is any difficulty and you get a `page not found` you will be penalized.
Google Analyticator. This will give you `on page` analysis of the number of visits, etc. Similar to the awstats you get from your cPanel.
SEO friendly images. This automatically adds the alt and title attributes to your images. This makes them friendlier for search engines and easier to find.
Slick WP Auto Post. This is an automatic article poster. You just load up a keyword relevant RSS feed and it automatically posts fresh content at a rate pre-designated by you.
Sociable. This is a great little plugin that will add links to your bookmarking sites.
Tweet My Blog. This automatically sends a tweet every time a new piece of content is posted to your blog.
WP DB-Manager. Very important plugin that allows you to easily back up your database and edit it. If your site gets hacked, this is invaluable in getting it back up.
I feel that these are minimum requirements for a WP blog today.
You may want to check out these:-
All-in-one-Adsense & YPN. Makes it easy to add Adsense ads or YPN where you want.
WP Unique. This is a controversial plugin that allows you to use articles posted on your keyword to places like Ezine and the other article directories and make them `unique` by adding your name as author. It gets around Google`s Duplicate content and even Copyscape by converting the code.(I will not say much more about this)
WP VideoTube. A favourite of mine. This will autopost videos from YouTube as designated by your stated keywords. This would be perfect for w pure Video Blog.
There are also some of the usual crap out there, mostly peddled by the same old culprits, we all know the ones that are constantly filling our spam filters with their latest `secret` or `underground` tactic. Yawn!! I have no qualms about exposing these shysters.
SEO Pressor. Supposedly capitalizes your H tags and bolds your keyword. There is absolutely no evidence that it helps in the slightest, and their forum seems to spend all of its time trying to track down the owner to answer the myriad of technical questions that arise from this piece of crap.
ViScript. Evidently posts a video blog for you automatically. It costs £100!! and you can find nowhere any support! Forget it and use WP VideoTube.
There are probably others if I could put my mid to it, but there you have it. I hope that this helps.
PS> If you have any errors when uploading WP plugins, you will find that it is best to use the file upload from within cPanel.

 

Thanks for your valuable information. There is one more thing I'd like to know.
Home page of my site is found in a Google's search. Other pages not there.
Does Sandbox keep the whole site or only some pages.

 

@chrisarnfield, great post and thank you for being such a great resource. I think you're totally right about how competitive the kw's are. I just checked my site that I thought was Sandboxed and it turns out it isn't. The industry is not that competitive and as a result all my content is "ranking" or indexed.

 

Google will sandbox the whole site, otherwise there would be no point in them sandboxing it.
You would be best to use the Google sitemap plugin to make sure that when the Googlebot crawls your site, it can find your pages.
This may sound primitive, but we shouldn't deign magic powers to Google. Their software is as erratic and `shot-in-the-dark as anybody elses!

Regards

Chris

 

I have found in my experiance that adding good value and not trying to make quick money helps dramaticly. Now I have found as of late that once google finds one of your sites on a shared hosting that it does not like for what ever reason then it will box all of them. I had a site that had about 200 visits a day I put up a new site using wp-robots and within a week my site that was doing good and I made no changes went to 10- 15 hits a day.

I belive that google will sand box you for any reason its system sees fit. I do not belive there is anything you can do to stop them but I do recomend if you have a good site. dont put a new site on the same hosting service,

I am interested to know how all of this works if you are using WP new multisite option how all your sites are effected across google. Does anyone have thoughts on this?