Google's Sandbox

For businesses whose depend on the Internet for income, being sandboxed can be a death sentence. In many cases, people prematurely diagnose a website which is not ranked well as sandboxed. In any case, you should contact an SEO expert before jumping to conclusions. Incorrect action can aggravates the problem. There are similar problems such as penalties by Google, robot obstructions, code errors or simply a low rating in search engines.

What is the sandbox?

Origin of name:

In software development, “sandbox” usually refers to a development environment to test new product separate from released code.  For example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sandbox is a place for people to practice how wiki-markup works without influencing the rest of Wikipedia.  When used in referenced to search results it means that the site is being kept separate from the rest of the search results.

Why do sites fall in the sandbox?

Falling into the sandbox is not related to the quantity of quality of the content the site. It is not dependent on the level of optimization of the site, links or backlinks. It is not punishment for for anything you did.  Site are are recently registered are more likely to sandboxed.  Also site that focus on highly competitive keywords are also more likely to be sandboxed.

Sandboxing is a way of Google to slow down to rate of change on the Internet.  Google does not want old established sites suddenly be replaced by new one of questionable quality.  At the same time google want to always give the best results.   As the most popular search engine, Google is constantly bombarded by spammers who figure out how google operates and creating a lot of spam sites designed to rake in traffic and revenue quickly.

To fight the phenomenon of spam in search results Google created a mechanism whereby each site gets a short time immediately after indexing in the search results but is then hidden away while Google carefully watches it.  After the site is trusted by Google it will be moved to the real search results.

How do you know if the site fell in the sandbox?

Sandboxed sites will not be found in relevant searches on Google. Unequivocal sign of sandbox is a search with the “site:” prefix to target only pages on your site.

Things to check to be sure you are sandboxed:

• Make sure the site appears properly in other search engines (there have not been reported cased of sandboxing on YAHOO! or Bing)
• The site does not appear in search results – not even for
  • Title Metatag
  • Tag meta description
  • Short text from the site with “quotes”
  • Ordinance: Site
• The site does not from other more ordinary problems (HTTP status, robots.txt, websites designs that obstruct robots)
• Check that outgoing links are current.  Dead outgoing links hurts you standing on Google.
• Check outgoing links for content.  Links farms sites, gambling sites, or pornographic site can label you a spammer.  If can happen if you sell links, or participate in “link exchange” programs.
• Check your security.  Hacker can insert malicious code on your site without any visible changes leading to a ban by google.  Do a comprehensive code review.

How to get out in the sandbox?

There is nothing you can directly do to get a site out of the sandbox.  The sandbox was designed to stop spammers from outsmarting Google and therefor purposely lacks any automated “tricks” to get out. The only thing you can go do is to wait a be patient, while continuing to build your site.

SEO while in the sandbox

Continue building links to the site. However, remember that you are under the magnifying glass of search engines and should be extra careful to avoid being labeled a spammer.

• Get high quality links to you site. Try to get a marketing cooperation agreements with other sites. Think of links as a way to get traffic and not on the “fix” the search engines.
• Avoid bad outgoing links.  When you link to someone you are recommending them and stating that they are trustworthy.  When you link to bad sites it reflects badly on you.
• Add links to a slow but constant pace.
• Try to get links from pages that are already ranked high for keywords you are targeting.
• See of other sites are stealing your content

It is important to understand that the promotion activities do not speed your departure from the sandbox, but has great affect on where you will be when you leave.

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