Just thought a quick post was in order about this as I have been argueing with a number of people recently as to if the sandbox exists or if it doesnt what exactly the “sandbox effect” is…!
The Google Sanbox idea has been making its way around the webmaster community forums for quite some time and the basic theory is a sound one. Most people thing that Google penalises new websites which gain quite a few links quite quickly and also that these new sites cannot rank well for competative keywords. I dont think this is quite how it works and the system is more likely to be a couple of filters created to stop spam sites, advertising only sites and domain parking sites from getting into the index.
This website has been live for 2 weeks now however it has never been spidered properly by Google until about 2 hours ago (after checking logfiles). Google came along this morning and took all the pages of the site even though it has only been indexing the homepage for the last 2 weeks (three times a day). I am guessing that the reason the site is now being spidered is:
a). 1 link gained to an internal page of the site.
b). 5 links gained from non forum based websites.
c). 1 linked gained from a 3 year old website with 9000 backlinks
This would suggest that Google has some sort of filter on sites with massive amounts of external links (e.g. forums) and so any links from those sites dont really count for much. Any quality SEO will tell you that we all know this and its true, the only thing those links are good for are IT / SEO and Marketing based keywords coming into the site, usually all to the homepage making the internal pages useless. It would be my opinion that the 5 related site links to the homepage spurred the Google spider to visit the site and look again at the content, and the 3 year old site that was linking to an internal page triggered Google spider’s to grab the rest of the sites content.
If this is indeed the sandbox effect at play (based on the site not being picked up for 2-3 weeks) then it has been my first experience of it and also it has been fairly easy to get out of. I have had a site indexed, grabbed and listed in the top 3 by Google before just 27 minutes after registering a new domain (I have the logs to prove it), for a popular search term, the site isnt live anymore so it isnt there, infact it actually redirects to one of my other sites as I moved the tools etc to that site. The point is that site never got sandboxed and none of my other sites have been which suggests to me that the sandbox is just a couple of filters that control the way Google grabs webpages.
As with all automated processes they can be manipulated to do almost anything you need them to.
I am currently wanting to do some more research into this “Sandbox” and so I need someone who has a site they think is sandboxed to contact me and let me have a poke around the logfiles etc. E-Mail me which your sites details so I can have a poke around, I wont change anything on the site I just want to have a look around, the only thing I may do is try to get a few inbound links to certain pages. If anyone is interested in giving me a hand please E-Mail me @ mailme.gazjones.com