Are You Playing In The Google Sandbox?
by: Dave “Inhibitor” Hughes
If you’re starting a new website or blog for your business, you will most likely wind up in a place called the Google Sandbox, which brings to mind sandcastles, dump trucks and beach toys. But it’s not the fun time you would think it is judging from the name.
It’s a bit closer to having sand kicked in your face at the beach.
The Sandbox has nothing really to do with your pagerank (PR) or your traffic level. It’s all tied in with your site’s keywords. However, it doesn’t start out badly for you at all.
Apparently, a new site is given what they call a “fresh boost” for anywhere from 8 to 16 weeks. During the “fresh boost” period, your site will show up quite high on the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page…the pages full of links you get when you perform a search on Google). After that, unless your backlinks, etc. have grown in a natural but rapid manner, you then get pushed to the Sandbox, where your google ranking (and PR, to some extent), get dropped down to probably where they should have been to begin with, but only on your “money” keywords (in other words, those keywords that there is heavy competition for, sometimes called “the keywords you want to be ranked for”).
This means that you may still rank very well on search terms such as “Romanian midget dating services” (terms that are not that competitive, because few, if any, others are using them as keywords for their site), but get lousy SERPs for “blogging”, “dating services”, or possible even “midget”. It’s not so much that your site is being put away for a while…but your keywords are.
How do you avoid the Sandbox? It’s not easy, and some say it’s impossible. If you ask the question “How can I avoid the Google Sandbox?” to one hundred different SEO experts, you will most likely get more than one hundred answers.
No one fully understands how the Google algorithms decide who goes into the box (and for how long, since the length of time a site spends in this state varies for each site), but the one thing that most will tell you is to make your site a valuable resource, filled with quality content.
Yes, even in the sandbox, content is king.
Apparently, part of the process is to have exactly the right quality of new backlinks to your site during this period (but not too many at one time or they’ll outright ban you) to avoid this, which is difficult to achieve from all reports.
What does this mean to you? If you’re just starting a blog or website for your home business, you may very well start off with fantastic results from the search engines, and then see your traffic drop to near nothing. Don’t let this discourage you when or if it happens…you haven’t done anything wrong. It’s part of the “Circle of Life” for a new website.
The good news is, it’s not permanent. The bad news is…sooner or later, almost everyone gets a chance to play in the box.
A few links with some interesting reading on the Google Sandbox:
SEO Roundtable – a good description of what the sandbox is.
SEOmoz.org – how to find out if you’re in the sandbox, or just have bad SEO for your site
Jim Westergren- a must-read bloggeries from a man that knows his stuff on SEO.
Author Bio:
Living in southern Mississippi, Dave “Inhibitor” Hughes has been in broadcast radio for over twenty years, and was one of the four founding partners of the original MMORadio, an internet-only radio station that became the first net-only station to be allowed to broadcast from the floor of E3 (the video game industry tradeshow) in 2005. While no longer a part of the internet radio business, he now writes about his passion for MMORPG video games at http://lagorama.com. Hib is currently driving his wife nuts with his newfound interest in the world of blogging and online business, but his two boys haven’t noticed much difference, claiming “Daddy’s still crazy, Momma…what’s wrong?”
39 Responses to “Are You Playing In The Google Sandbox?”
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