What Is Google Sandbox?

Oct 07

What Is Google Sandbox?

Google Sandbox is the name used to describe Google’s filter that disables quality ranking and rating of new domain names. Sandbox supposed to prevent spammers spam the search engine. Some say it’s a myth and other say it’s real but Google hasn’t officialy recognized the “sandbox” although Matt Cutts admitted it.

What’s going on?
So how does Sandbox looks like? Say you register a domain mygfhasbigtits.com, you set-up a blog with some text and pictures and you do some basic SEO and if Sandbox gets you, you won’t rank in top 10 even for your own unique domain such as “my gf has big tits”. Not pretty, I agree. It’s there to fight spammers but it’s still not inteligent enough to know who’s actually a spammer and who’s just starting out.

What causes Sandbox to strike?
Google Sandbox is like a bad luck, you never know when it’s going to get you. Nobody can say for sure why some websites get trapped into Google Sandbox and others don’t but registering a domain and getting your website indexed in Google doesn’t neccessarily mean you’re going to get sandboxed. You can rank good for your keywords and even months can pass after you have been picked up by Goggle but then one time your website will completely dissapear from Google. Many webmasters and bloggers immediatly think they got banned by Google because they did something bad but that doesn’t have to be true, perhaps you just got sandboxed. You don’t have to do anything and you’ll still get sandboxed, it’s an undiscovered phenomenon.

Can you escape Sandbox?
After you get picked up by Google Sandbox it can last anywhere from 6 months to a year and a half for your site to be out of Google. More popular your keywords are more chances you have to be in a Sandbox for a longer period of time. Can I escape Sandbox? I can’t say that because nobody can say that for sure. My suggestion would be to build on your backlinks and overall popularity of your website or a blog. Never rely only on Google, there is a lot of work to do on Yahoo and MSN and I can bet anything you want not all of your traffic comes from search engines unless you run MFA sites. If you get sandboxed there’s nothing you can do about it. Deal with it and continue to develop your website because as soon as you get out of it you’ll rank for your keywords.

How to check if you got sandboxed?
There’s a way to check this but you need to be sure your website deserves a position for a certain keyword in top 50 otherwise it can just be bad SEO. There are three useful commands used in google to show what pages in the index have the highest ranking weight for a keyword in a domain, title and anchor text. Those commands are allinanchor:keyword, allintitle:keyword and allinurl:url. Go to Google now and check your website for keywords you rank for. Like this:

allinanchor:daily blogging tips
allinanchor:web 2.0 development
allinanchor:make money online
allinanchor:entrepreneurship
allinanchor:paris hilton sex tape

The same goes with other two command with the exception of a last one which is a backlink checker, you need to input your own URL in there. If you don’t find your website for your keywords in top 50 SERPs or if you don’t find it at all, chances are you got sandboxed. Be sure to check your generic text because if you rank for that and not for anything else then it’s not Sandbox but your lousy SEO skills. You can always peek in Awstats to see whether your Google traffic has dropped drasticly.