The Mythical Google Sandbox Keeps Good People Down
September 25, 2006 – 3:12 pmIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
I read comments every day about people who are stuck in the dreaded “Google Sandbox”. One poor fella recently even got stuck in the “Sandbox” and his website was 7 years old! I guess it couldn’t play nice with the other sites and got punished. Some people think there’s an “aging factor” that keeps their website down and out. I’m convinced it’s all crap.
In fact, in the last few months, the primary success I’ve had has been launching brand new websites, not squeezing additional performance out of old ones. My oldest domain took a complete dump and I have, get this: a website founded on 8/30/2006 that has done 44,000 unique visitors from search engines in one week! How’s that for kicking the Sandbox straight in the ass?
How did I do it? Simple. I linked from my existing blogs. That’s all, and case closed.
I made no effort to build any links (other that social bookmarking deeplinks) and concentrated on writing content. The website actually was indexed within 24 hours, and had rankings within the 72 hour mark. As I write this, I see I’ve had 5,200 uniques today alone from MSN and Google.
The main reason I feel like this website got off to a good start was because I didn’t spend much time with the SEO (search engine friendly URLs and sitemap), and it was “seeded” with trusted links from existing blogs. The fact that you update and ping tends to keep the spidering frequent, and in certain industries you have much less established conditions.
Do some people run into a “Sandbox”? Sure, they must. I don’t imagine everyone is making up their experiences. But for a lot of new websites in lightly competitive fields, I suggest you get moving on improved content and get a few trusted links to start. It shouldn’t take much more than that to compete.
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3 Responses to “The Mythical Google Sandbox Keeps Good People Down”
I was looking at my traffic stats, and for some reason Yahoo accounts for 92% of search engine hits, while Google only accounts for 2%, thats rather odd I would say considering how much MORE Google is used. Or just Google just rank me so low, my hits from them are pretty far off for users.
By TechZ on Sep 26, 2006
That means your traffic from Google is low.
Yahoo can send a lot of traffic, but they are not in the same class as Google.
By Darren McLaughlin on Sep 26, 2006
Yahoo and Google function a little different too.
Its a good feeling when you see a balanced amount of traffic from all of the search engines, and not just one..
By Heather on Sep 26, 2006