Does the “sandbox” effect really exist?
After running this blog a little over a month, I’ve started to get some search traffic. It boggles my mind that people even discuss Google “sandbox” as an actual topic.
Google “Sandbox” could be interpreted as punishment for promoting and linkbuilding too quickly after you buy a new domain and hosting.
This is what happens (hypothetically):
- You purchase a domain and hosting
- Quickly develop a blog/website
- Begin linkbuilding and promotion
- Google detects you have too many inbound links on a domain which is only a few days/weeks old
- They see this as spamming (probably because you actually are spamming)
- Your site is dumped into a list of other websites which are of low quality
- It is kept there until you develop proper backlinks or your “penalty time” has expired
- Patience is key, eventually you will be ranked (unless you really just spam)
If your website does not start to rank after about a month and a half, you are certainly in the “sandbox” – to check if your website is in or not, simply search “site:yourdomain.com” in Google. To check your keyword rank, search allinanchor:”keyword you want to rank on”
The sandbox mostly applies to competitive keywords, this means, if you’re out of the “sandbox”, you probably still won’t rank very well for those keywords regardless. Getting that better ranking takes months, if not years of work.
The Google “Dance” is another interesting effect which almost everyone will go through. If your website is new then you’ll notice you’re getting some traffic for certain keywords, but from day to day your individual rankings constantly move up and down. While it’s not known exactly why this happens, it’s based usually on the age of your website as well as the authority it has. For almost anyone with a new website, it’s almost impossible to consistently rank on even lightly competitive keywords.
The only thing I can add to this is, keep working on getting your keyword rankings increased, it takes time and focus but will most certainly pay off in the long run.
