Google’s “Sandbox Effect” Fact or Fiction?
Saturday, June 21st, 2008A lot of SEO’s, web developers / web designers are questioning what is happening with their new web sites and why they aren’t showing up in the SERP’s in and around the first 3 pages of Google. The SERP’s on MSN and Yahoo are providing them with good placement in their normal amount of time, so what gives?
The “Sandbox Effect” means that Google is somehow not returning new sites near the top of the SERP’s until the site has been fathered in if you will. Then the next question that remains to be answered is when is a site considered fathered in? From what anyone can tell at this time the answer is anywhere from 3 to 8 months.
So in closing it appears that Google made some type of change to their algorithm sometime in mid to late 2004 that checks a sites age in the index. So all SEO’s out there can stop tweaking and messing with their code over and over thinking it’s them because that most definitely is not the case!
The only alternative that I have been able to come up with as a short term remedy to the problem is to do some Pay Per Click advertising with Overture and Google. MSN also has a new Pay Per Click solution that it will be introducing shortly, so stay tuned for that. The good thing about starting with pay per click is you will be able to play with different keywords and see what type of positive results you get with different keywords and keyphrases.