Google’s sandbox

One of the strangest phenomena in the Google world is the sandbox. Say you create a new site and are able to get it indexed in Google. A link to it from the right place is sometimes all you need for a page. So you see in your stats that Google has visited your site and a few days later you are about to check your site in the Google index. You carefully type in http://www.yoursite.com/, hit enter and yup, there’s your puppie! Awesome, in just about the blink of an eye you made it into Google’s index. Naturally, you are also eager to know what place you are in the search engine results. Take as an example that you opitmised the site for a three keyword phrase “word1 word2 word3″. So you type those three words in and let the results display. It appears you are not on the first page. That’s OK, since there is some strong competition going on for this keyword combo. You hit for the next results page. Again, your site isn’t there. In fact, it appears not to be in the first 100 of results. Guess things will be a little tougher than you thought. But you keep on searching and finally hit the last page. Your site isn’t there also. In fact it didn’t come up in the search results at all? Why is that?

The answer is: you’ve been sandboxed by Google. For some undetermined period, at least a couple of months, your site won’t appear in the search engine results for some more competitive keywords. Mind you, it is there. It is indexed and Google knows about your site. But it’s algorithm has decided not to show you for some terms while for others (the least interesting) you do show up.

Am I making this up? Not at all. Matt Cutts aknowledged there is such a thing as the sandbox on a PubCon conference. Brett Tabke, webmaster of webmasterworld asked the question there directly to Matt. His answer was that (and I quote from a thread at webmasterworld)

that there wasn’t a sandbox, but the algorithm might affect some sites, under some circumstances, in a way that a webmaster would perceive as being sandboxed.

I know from experience that it doesn’t have to be a whole site that is affected but can just be one page. I have done some testing where I put up a bunch of articles. A couple of genuine reviews I wrote together with some scraper reviews. I got a decent link pointing at it making sure Google would visit the site often and all pages would be indexed. All of the articles were indexed, but one genuine review got sandboxed. This review was in a really competitive niche and about buying something. I used the keyword “buy” in another review but as that was sort of the only real review of that product to be found on the internet it takes the first place in the results. Clearly it was not the specific keyword that triggered this.

Nobody really can tell whether your site will be sandboxed or not. There is speculation however, like when you point a link to it from a webpage with high pagerank you will avoid the sandbox. I can’t tell whether this is actually true.

And why does it exist? Debate about that too. Clearly, the Google folks are happy with this effect. Most webmasters aren’t and I am one of them. It is a lot less fun working on a website you know the next year or so noone will look at.