Google Sandbox Questions

[MarkPearson]

I am aware google place new sites into sandbox mode.

Does this mean they DON'T list them

or

they don't give them their full listing potential.

My site/ domain was created/registered on 27-sep-2005

So by 27th dec it will only be online for 3 months.

How long do google sandbox sites for?

When will the site be classed as approved (not sandboxed)?



For example the term 'personalised roses' we appear top in yahoo and msn search

But for google we are not even listed in the first 6 pages! (never bothered looking further)

But when i type in 'rosesbydesign' they are listing us first?

[Eagle]

Use MSN.

http://search.msn.co.uk/

MSN spiders, rates and lists sites within hours - none of that Google idiot-box nonsense!

Oh look - you're about tenth on the first page for 'roses by design' and 3rd for 'rosesbydesign' (which is hardly surprising)... ;)
*

[MarkPearson]

Yes, msn and yahoo are a lot faster at listing new sites and we are doing ok with listings on these search sites.

But google has a lot of the UK's web traffic

[DuaneJackson]

They do list them. If you're flagged as sandboxed (which virtually all new domains appear to be) then it's just another factor that goes into the algorithm. Don't expect to rank at all for highly competitive terms (mortgages, small business software, etc), or very well for medium-competiive terms (personalised roses), but you should rank for unique terms - rosesbydesign.


Time in the box is anything from 3-12 months. If you behave yourself and don't try any dodgy SEO techniques you'll eventually come out. Don't build up hundred of links in a short period of time.

[MarkPearson]

YOU SAY:
Don't build up hundred of links in a short period of time.


Why not, are links not good?

If I run an affiliate program and have a few hundred people linking to us via text and banner links would that count?

[multilingual]

Search engines like Google like to think that a site is being grown organically, and that people are linking to your site becasue the site is worth linking to.

It is easy to buy thousands of links into your site, but this is not true organic growth. So if you are a new site and suddenly get 100 new links per day coming in then this is seen as an attempt to spam the system and you can (and probably will) be penalised for it.

Gradually increase the links by all means, just not too many too fast.

JB

[DuaneJackson]

100 links per day coming in is fine..... if you can mantain it. JB basically answered the question there really. The key word being organic.

[DarrenC]

They do list them. If you're flagged as sandboxed (which virtually all new domains appear to be) then it's just another factor that goes into the algorithm. Don't expect to rank at all for highly competitive terms (mortgages, small business software, etc), or very well for medium-competiive terms (personalised roses).

It doesn't matter if the keyword is competitive or not - the site does not rank for any keyword term for 3 - 12 months. The way around this is sign up for Google Adwords and drive traffic to your website.

MSN, and Yahoo will spider and list your website very quickly, but forget about getting anywhere near the amount of traffic that Google refers to you.

The recent 'jagger' update took place on Google - and many people are saying that the weight of a reciprocal link has been drastically reduced, and one-way links are the way forward.

From my own experience I'd have to agree with them.

Darren

[Eagle]

It doesn't matter if the keyword is competitive or not - the site does not rank for any keyword term for 3 - 12 months.
I'd have to disagree there. :) A recent site of mine was ranked (quite highly) by Google within three weeks of going live. :shock:

:)

[Tin]

I'd like to add my 2p worth based on my own findings.

Google started sandboxing sites on 16th November 2003. It's widely thought of as a measure for reducing the amount of spam in Google's search results and tends to affect links to a site more than the site itself.
As has been mentioned, the 'delay' can be anything up to 12 months and I was one of the many caught by this new measure in November when I lauched a few sites that same month.
One of my new sites went straight to page 1 of Google in the first week but this was a fluke and is certainly not the norm by any means so you've a long wait Mark unless you're extremely lucky - even then you'll only appear with high rankings if you've seo'd your site for the right keywords. If you've not seo'd your site you won't appear on page 1 whether the sandbox is 2 months 12 months or 12 years.

It's to be expected you appear #1 for the search 'rosesbydesign' as you've no competition for that word which brings me to my next point.
Don't think of the sandbox as a 'total ban' from serps it isn't, you will have page 1 results in Google for some keywords other than 'rosesbydesign' but they will be what I call 'fringe serps' and not the more competitive 'main serps'. Googles sandbox merely prevents your site from appearing in the 'business end' of results until sufficient time has passed to allow your site to come out fully.
Rosesbydesign is very much a fringe serp with only 399 competing pages so it's not surprising you show up, personalised roses as a search phrase is less of a fringe serp, Google.com shows there's 472,000 competing pages for that serp and accordingly doesn't show you. Heavyweight serps like 'red roses' where there's almost 10 million competing pages will be a hard nut to crack but I'd expect you to do really well from that one in the future if you can get at it.

You've got to be in Google if you run a business in the UK as it's responsible for over 80% of conducted searchers. In the USA it's quite different with Google getting 34% Yahoo 32% and MSN 28% with the remaining 6% coming from minor engines and directories. Clearly, sandboxing isn't quite the same problem over there.

Regarding links, I wouldn't advice 100 a day (3000 per month is a link spike I think Google would have no problem noticing) if it doesn't ban your site for this number it would certainly 'raise a flag' on them so you'd be wasting your time in the long run.
I'd go for 100 a month for a few months then slowly build them up using ever changing anchor text which judging by the number of posts you make here is something you're missing out on.
Get links from 'related' sites and if you are offered the chance to do custom submissions then use them wisely.
Try this technique on Google for finding related sites (type in exactly as shown including inverted commas)

"add_url" + "flowers" this gives you 192 potential places to submit to
"add_url" + "florists" gives 179
"add_url" + "roses" gives 55

then make subtle changes to the first part of the search string like;

"addurl" + "roses" this gives 1,180
"addurl" + "flowers" this gives 13,700

and so on.

Hope that helps. Do you know about the huge show in London? It might be good to go.

Ray

[DuaneJackson]

Good stuff Ray, I agree with every word of it. I'll be keeping an eye out for other posts you make on this subject to hopefully learn a thing or two.

[DarrenC]

It doesn't matter if the keyword is competitive or not - the site does not rank for any keyword term for 3 - 12 months.
I'd have to disagree there. :) A recent site of mine was ranked (quite highly) by Google within three weeks of going live. :shock:

:)

Eagle, did you point just one link or a number of links to the domain - because my new domain, was ranking well in Google for around 2 weeks, with just one link pointing to it - I added a small number of other links, and its been dumped out of the results since.

Darren

[Eagle]

The only link I placed was one from a redundant page on my site... :?:

Otherwise it was pretty much on it's own with only a few other inbound (external) links. :)

[Tin]

Darren, if your site is very new it's possible the serps you noticed for your site were due to a 'freshbot' listing. As far as I'm aware (although things could have changed recently) Google uses a number of bots to scour sites, the one affectionately known as 'freshbot' seems to be only looking for brand new sites/pages which are then returned to Googles database but do not carry a 'cached value' at this time. It's common for a very new site to be found by freshbot, added to Googles index within a short time frame and actually show up in Googles search results on high pages (page 1 is quite common). Trouble is that depending on the phase of discovery by the bot then your subsequent great listing it can suddenly disappear once Google has factored in the full contents of your site and deemed where in its index you belong.
I've heard this situation referred to as the 'treehouse effect' (don't ask me who called it that, I've no idea) but I've experienced quite similar symptoms you describe since Nov 2003. The only thing I do is sit and wait it out while building links slowly during the waiting period. If the seo is ok across the site you'll see your ranking re-appear.

Don't hold me to anything :-) it's only my experience and the search engine world changes almost hourly.

Good luck with your site, I hope you do well with it.

Ray