Google Sandbox FAQ - Everything you need to know

What is the sandbox?

Basically its a time period that keywords that are competitive must wait in order to achieve results on Google.

Is it real?

Better believe it.

Does the sandbox effect my entire site?

No! It is keyword related only. Say you make a site for home loans. Everything about the site is home loan this and home loan that. But you name your site www. doodypants.com. Now you will rank well for the term “doody pants” because it is not competitive. But you will be in the sandbox for the keyword “home loans”.

What can I do to avoid the sandbox?

This is really not possible. I dont care what trick you have up your sleeve, you will not rank in the first few pages for “home loans” until you did your time with the other children in the sandbox. This just cant and wont happen until they remove it.

To avoid the sandbox though you can target non competitive keywords. By doing this you are able to jump up in the ranks very quickly but chances are those terms have a crappy search per day so it wont be bringing in much traffic.

What can I do while I am in the sandbox?

Just go on about your business. Create backlinks and work on your content.

How long will I be in the sandbox?

The general term that is thrown out there is 9 months. But this is dependant on how competitive your keyword is. The more competitive the longer you wait.

How can I tell if I am in the sandbox?

Doing a search for allinanchor:”keyword” is the best way to tell. My general rule is if you have go through and search page by page looking for your URL and find it then you are not in the sandbox. But if you get tired of looking and your fingers start to hurt and you quit before you find it then you are in the sandbox.

I heard if I build links slowly I wont go in the sandbox

We have all heard this and I dont know who started this whole theory but I personally dont believe in this. I think someone people just tried this out and they started ranking for the keyword they were targetting. What I bet is that keyword wasnt competitive anyways.

All of the answers are based on MY experiences. Everyone on the internet has had different experiences and has different opinions. If you disagree with anything here I would like to here why. (be detailed)

Google PageRank 10 Websites List (Updated April 2008)

Google describes PageRank (PR) as
“PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages ‘important’.”

Webmasters just dream about getting PageRank 10. Though it is unofficially proved that PageRank has very little effect on SERP, webmasters would do anything to achieve higher PR. There are webmasters or SEO companies who don’t even slightly hesitate to apply Black Hat SEO / spamming for PR even though know they might be blacklisted in Google.

Anyway, here is a list of PageRank 10 websites according to Google PageRank update on April, 2008.

Comprehensive SEO Guide to Increase Your SE Ranking

Comprehensive SEO Guide to Increase Your Search Engine Ranking
By: Jason Miller

Things that this article will cover which search engines use to determine your positioning are:

• Domain Maturity
• Anchor Texts
• HTML Attributes
• Site Popularity - Linking Strategies
• Title Tags and Headings
• Lists (Ordered and Unordered)
• Content Formatting (Bolding and Italics)
• Site Layout and Design
• Keywords
• Keyword Density
• Content & Content Placement
• Page Doctypes
• Geo-Targeting
• Meta Data
• Code Bloat Reduction
• XML Site Maps
• Website Log Analyzation
• 404 Error Handling
• Robots.txt
• BlackHat Techniques to Avoid

Read the rest of this entry