Google Sandbox - is it real? Who knows…..who cares.
What I have been noticing in this industry is there’s a lot of people trying to reinvent the wheel, and most of it is a joke.
I own a few domains, and I have never had a site ’sandboxed’. I have ranked for many domains, and they still rank till this day.
The last joke I heard was about Google Branding. I’m not sure if the search engines are hiring people to mislead others or what.
Back to the Sandbox…
The Google Sandbox is considered a ‘probationary period’ given to a new website. Even though your website may have a high Pagerank, lots of backlinks, and quality content it will not rank high in the SERPs. This filter is said to be placed on ‘new websites’.
Here’s how I avoid being in the sandbox
1. Post new content every day, other day, or once per week.
2. Interlink the pages on your website. If Google finds one page then they’ll find the others because you’re interlinking.
3. Place a nofollow link attribute on all irrevelant external AND internal links. This is very important because you can’t control how long the robots will be on your website, but at least you can control where they go. This will make the crawl more effective, and they wont waste time on pages that do not matter.
4. Obtain ‘quality backlinks’ to your website. Here’s another issue that new websites have. Most people would send a backlink to their homepage, but will not get backlinks for other pages on their site. If you do a link:domain.com on Yahoo, you will see a large amount of backlinks to the homepage, but not to the rest of the site. I do about 40-50% backlinks to the homepage, and the rest to individual pages on my website. Make sure to also obtain links that are DOFOLLOW to your site.
5. Stop constantly changing the meta tag title or description! Just like the content…you need to make sure it’s perfect before broadcasting the page. Changing the meta tag title can have a huge impact in the SERPs. I changed my homepage meta tag title, and went from middle of page 3 for the keyword seo, to the bottom of page 4.
6. Buy a domain that contains the keywords or buy an old domain. I have seen this many times where the website ranks in the top #5 for competitive keyterms just because of the age of the domain or because the keywords are included in the domain name.
