by Alan Rabinowitz
The infamous and theoretical Google Sandbox Effect, where new domains are reported to take 9 months or longer to rank. Notice something interesting about the 9 Months? 9 Months is a life cycle of humans. We are in the womb for 9 months before we are born. Google uses this timeline in its sandbox effect so that all websites must be born into Google.
Interesting how life and Google are handled the same. For some of us, life and Google seem to cross paths quite often. So what is the Sandbox? The Google Sandbox is a theoretical gateway into the Google index. Apparently, this gateway is somewhat square or boxlike in nature. Getting out of the box and into the index to be seen by the rest of the world, can be a big challenge and well worth the effort to anyone that wants to see traffic from the Search Engines.
These are several schools of thought here. One being age factors, and the fact that new sites do not have link age, site age and page age. Another is the TrustRank factors that are needed for Google to consider the site to be trustworthy, and age is one trust factor. Other TrustRank factors can include certain types of high quality and industry related links.
We caution companies that are seeking SEO services and have a brand new domain, which anyone claiming a shorter time frame than 9 Months, is not being realistic, so be warned. Brand new domains and domains that you have owned for years, but never did anything with, are likely candidates to sit in this theoretical square.
Yahoo and MSN do not block websites the way Google does, so ranking can be achieved in both engines before Google will let the site rank.
A site coming out of the sandbox will have fewer terms ranking by nature, and the scope will broaden in time once a few get to the Top 10 of the results pages. The more competitive the term, the longer it can take for a site to rank as well as the higher you get, the slower the movement upward would appear.
Simply stated, The Google Sandbox is a spam prevention part of the algorithm that will prevent PPC Arbitrage spammers from developing sites overnight that rank on new news topics.
If you think that putting up a website and waiting 9 months is the right thing to do, think again, you may never know that Google has indexed your site and that you even have the ability to rank. An important factor is Site Age, which is not based on the age of the domain but is based on the age of the website in a particular search engine database. So the earlier you start the better you will be when getting out of the sandbox. The only issue a site in the Google Sandbox will have is that it will not show for competitive terms aside from its domain name in Google for approximately nine (9) months from the date Google first finds the website.