Google Sandbox – moving out

'The Google "Sandbox"

From Wikipedia:  . . .  is a purgatory like state, in which a new or penalized site is spidered by the Google bots, accumulates backlinks and page rank, but does not appear in Google searches for appropriate keywords.  .  .  .'

New sites, including blogs like this one, usually get close to zero search engine traffic, i.e. from people searching via Google, Yahoo!, etc. They simply do not show up highly in search results, if at all.

In comparison, many established sites get literally thousands of visitors a day from the search engines. If I had started this blog as part of an existing site, for example as demop.com/blogging4biz, it would not have been sandboxed and would have rapidly gotten significant search engine traffic.

It's not uncommon for a blog to get 25% or much more of its traffic from search engines. The sandbox is a mythical yet very real state, which prevents this search engine traffic. It is often called the Google sandbox, since it's most obvious on Google.

Like most things related to search engines, no one agrees on the sandbox, although it's very real. It seems to last 3-9 months, usually 3-4 according to many search engine optimization (SEO) experts.

Looks like Blogging For Business finally is out of the sandbox! It has taken about 4 months from blog creation. The last couple of days, 12% of traffic is coming from search engines. Often search engine traffic is highly directed and can lead to long time readers.

How do you "get out of the sandbox?" Wait, there's nothing else you can do.

Note that being in sandbox is different from being banned. Sites get banned for doing bad things, typically using Black Hat (unethical) SEO techniques. A site that is banned by Google doesn't get indexed at all, and Google bans a lot of sites!

Comments

[Joseph Thornley]

Good post Ted. Having launched my blog, www.propr.ca, about five months ago, I have been trying to understand what I must do to appear in Google searches.

By the way, what statistics package are you using? Would you recommend it?

[T Demop, Blogging for Business]

Hi Joseph,

Thanks! I'm using StatCounter.com. It's pretty good, although I haven't figured out all the bells and whistles yet.

Basic service is free. I signed up for an account, added the required code to my blog's template, and was up and running in literally less than ten minutes!

For a high traffic e-commerce site that depended on organic search engine traffic, you'd probably want the paid service. The free service only keeps track of details for the last 100 visitors, such as keywords they searched on or links they followed to get to your site/blog.

SiteMeter.com is another free one many bloggers recommend.

[Zoi]

"Note that being in sandbox is different from being banned."

Yes. Some people think that their sites are banned when Google puts them in a place where they belong according to normal algorithms and they don't appear in the search results. I wrote an article about this in Serbian here:
http://webdesignzone.net/blog/blogovi/google_sandbox.php

or some other SEO tips:

http://webdesignzone.net/blog/

[Vizlog poslovni adresar]

I was afraid of Google sandbox after one of my small websites disappeared, but I rad a lot about Google and came with the answer that you must constantly work on the site so Google and users can realize that your site is worth of visiting.

After this I made a site that wasn't touched with Google sandbox. Google says all the time that you must keep users with interesting content. So do that!