how do I get out of Google's sandbox?

[David]

It would seem that I over did the keyword phrase thing.

I've got a client, a moving company, they had a site but it didn't rank at all...
not for the keyword phrase he wanted targeted.

so... I made him 3 blogs, the blogs were ranking a lot higher than his main site.

BUT

the company is We Help U Move Inc.
original/ main website: We Help-U-Move, Inc.

keyword phrase: Frederick Maryland movers I got on the second page
keyword phrase: Frederick Maryland Moving company I couldn't get...
you see, there IS a competitor called Frederick Moving Company

What I've done for We Help U Move so far:

We Help U Move Inc.
We Help Hagerstown Move - We Help-U-Move Inc.

this next one ranked on the second page but I think I over did the keywords because it's vanished today:

We Help Frederick Maryland Move - We-Help-U-Move Inc.

What must I do to get that last blog out of the sandbox?

I'm thinking I should post more to 'thin out' the keyword stuffing I did.

any more ideas gang?

[David]

I just found this thread I started.... apparently I've got a few threads that nobody replied to

in any case I did work my way out of the sand box, just in case any newbies were lurking in the forum.

.. so yes virginia, there is a Sandbox Claus

I did it, well Google wont simply reveal exactly what criteria they use for the algorithm, but I did it by 'watering down' each post after what I suspected were the offending posts.

ie, used anything OTHER than the keywords that I think I over used.

I'll never be exactly sure what 'triggered' the sand box issue, but I did get it resolved.

My client's site is performing well now

[strauss]

But i too have no idea, but looking for this....

[dburk]

Hi David & strauss

Google doesn't have a sandbox to get out of. You never were in a sandbox. There is a common event that people often refer to as a the "Sandbox Effect". It's not a penalty or even a bad thing.

Google ranks websites in it's index with an algorithm that uses many different factors. One of these factors it the "freshness factor" (a.k.a. QDF) that will temporary boost the ranking of newly added pages. After this "freshness factor" boost wears off, your web page will drop to it's truly deserving rank.

Your new web pages were given a temporary boost (this is a good thing). Now go to work building traffic and backlinks so that you can earn a lasting higher ranking in Google's index.

[michaelbeauchamp]

Hey Don,

I've also been a bit confused about that, thanks for the explanation.

I hope it's not a dumb question, but waht's QDF stand for?

Cheers,

Michael

[dburk]

Hi Michael,

QDF stands for "Query Deserves Freshness" and it's the term Google's algorithm specialists use internally.

[magnum3]

how do you got out of the sandbox??? hmmm

[dburk]

Originally Posted by magnum3

how do you got out of the sandbox??? hmmm

The sandbox that doesn't exist?

The question you should be asking is "how do I improve my ranking"?

Just because the freshness factor only helps your ranking when your page is um... fresh, doesn't mean your in a sandbox or penalized in any way. It means you have competitors that rank higher than you do.

Oh.. and if there is a sandbox, we're all in it together. If you get out of it, you've been dropped from Google's index.

[faverr]

I have come across a problem that looks a lot like the thing that has been called the "Google Sandbox." It was a problem where my web host had blocked IP addresses that happened to be the IP addresses of Google spider bots. What will happen is that a shared server at a web host might get a bunch of visits from Google trying to crawl the various domains hosted on the shared server. All this activity from a small set of IP addresses looks to the security software on the machine like an attack, so it blocks the addresses. I just wrote a post the other day with more detail. I'm not sure how to reference that post here, but you can do a search here in the forum for "Google Sandbox - My Theory" to find it. My web host fixed my problem for me and confirmed that they were blocking Google bot IPs.

[dburk]

Wow, your host blocked googlebot! What a bad host, what next, will they block traffic from those pesky browsers that keep requesting data packets.

[David]

Thanks Don, so I didn't run afoul of the 'powers that be'.


Cool, so then my creating a company blog for my client ranked at first only because it was 'fresh'?

Ok, then if that's the case this means I EARNED this top spot, I got We Help-U-Move Inc ranked the hard way:

Results 1 - 10 of about 466,000 for frederick md movers.

Grabbed #5 and #8
note that we're the ONLY real moving company listed in the top ten, the other 8 are directories that look more like 'created for adsense' sites.

frederick md movers - Google Search

We-Help-U-Move, Frederick Maryland's mover We Help U Move Incorporated is aptly named... no other Frederick Maryland Mover offers YOU choices like this: Full Service Move ...
wehelpfrederickmove.blogspot.com/ - 84k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this

Frederick Maryland Moving Companies Oct 31, 2008 ... We provide you with a listing of several movers in Frederick Maryland, MD. Our site offers moving and packing tips, storage information, ...
frederickmdmoving.wordpress.com/ - 30k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this

so:

"There is no sand box"

and

"There is no spoon"

[faverr]

Originally Posted by dburk

Wow, your host blocked googlebot! What a bad host, what next, will they block traffic from those pesky browsers that keep requesting data packets.

Actually, I imagine it's pretty hard for a hosting company to avoid blocking Google IPs. I found out while investigating this problem that Google does not publish it bots' IP addresses, because they can change periodically. So I'm not sure how a hosting company can guarantee they'll never block Google bot IP addresses. If some machine on the web suddenly starts hitting a hosting company's machine with an unusually high number of requests, it would sort of make sense that the security software would want to shut things down immediately to prevent a hacker from taking the whole machine down. (I hope I'm wrong with what I'm saying here, because I hate the thought of this happening to me every so often).

[dburk]

Hi faverr,

The Googlebot is a very tame bot. There is no way that a hosting company would have blocked this bot unless they were inept. It's a trivial task to do a nslookup and see that the address belongs to Google. Any automated tool used for this task would allow for normal bot activity.

It might be time to look for a better host.

[faverr]

I've heard HostGator is good. Anyone know if that's true?

[strauss]

It was really nice information..

[faverr]

Since no one has responded to my question about whether or not HostGator is good, I'm going to assume that they are good based on recommendations I've gotten from more than one person. Although dburk (above) makes the claim that they must be inept, they took care of my problem with the blocked Google bot IP addresses within a few hours of my contacting them by email, so I have to say I'm impressed.

So I'm not convinced that the task to avoid blocking Google bot IPs is as trivial as dburk claims. Certainly it's trivial if you only have one machine to administer. But I've worked as a professional programmer for 22 years, and I've seen how some of the most basic things can get missed when you have 100 basic things to take care of within a swirl of competing priorities; something is bound to slip through the cracks some time. The more important issue is how quickly one can get things resolved once a problem occurs (assuming the number of problems that occurs is not excessive).

I also believe that the Google bots may not be so tame. Support at HostGator implied otherwise. Also, in Google Webmaster Tools there is a way to configure your account to tell Google to run more slowly when it accesses your site(s); this configuration option seems to indicate that sometimes the Google bot causes problems by accessing too much too fast -- otherwise why would there be the option to throttle the bot in Google's Webmaster Tools?

And even if they have "tame bots," probably they are tame on a per domain basis. But if a hosting company is hosting several domains on a shared server, Google's bots could easily hit each of the domains individually at the same time in a "tame way" but the aggregation of doing them simultaneously could be far more intensive.

So the bottom line in this long post is this: If your listings in Google go away, it could be caused by your hosting company blocking Google bot IP addresses thereby preventing the bots from crawling your site. I would not assume that just because your hosting company is "ept" (or good at what they do) that they could never block Google bot IPs.

[cscott5288]

create a new website with identical content

[faverr]

Originally Posted by cscott5288

create a new website with identical content

There are two difficulties with your approach. First, if you had any history in Google that provides you high ranking and if you have backlinks from other sites contributing to that high rank, those will be lost when you put your content on a new domain. Second, if you host your new web site (and domain) with your same web host under your same account, your new domain will end up on the same hosting machine (very likely) and you'll still have the same problem, because that machine will still be blocking Google bot IPs.

[Li Weng]

Originally Posted by dburk

Hi David & strauss

Google doesn't have a sandbox to get out of. You never were in a sandbox. There is a common event that people often refer to as a the "Sandbox Effect". It's not a penalty or even a bad thing.

Google ranks websites in it's index with an algorithm that uses many different factors. One of these factors it the "freshness factor" (a.k.a. QDF) that will temporary boost the ranking of newly added pages. After this "freshness factor" boost wears off, your web page will drop to it's truly deserving rank.

Your new web pages were given a temporary boost (this is a good thing). Now go to work building traffic and backlinks so that you can earn a lasting higher ranking in Google's index.

That's interesting to know. Thanks for sharing that information.

[dburk]

Originally Posted by faverr

Since no one has responded to my question about whether or not HostGator is good, I'm going to assume that they are good based on recommendations I've gotten from more than one person. Although dburk (above) makes the claim that they must be inept, they took care of my problem with the blocked Google bot IP addresses within a few hours of my contacting them by email, so I have to say I'm impressed.

So I'm not convinced that the task to avoid blocking Google bot IPs is as trivial as dburk claims. Certainly it's trivial if you only have one machine to administer. But I've worked as a professional programmer for 22 years, and I've seen how some of the most basic things can get missed when you have 100 basic things to take care of within a swirl of competing priorities; something is bound to slip through the cracks some time. The more important issue is how quickly one can get things resolved once a problem occurs (assuming the number of problems that occurs is not excessive).

I also believe that the Google bots may not be so tame. Support at HostGator implied otherwise. Also, in Google Webmaster Tools there is a way to configure your account to tell Google to run more slowly when it accesses your site(s); this configuration option seems to indicate that sometimes the Google bot causes problems by accessing too much too fast -- otherwise why would there be the option to throttle the bot in Google's Webmaster Tools?

And even if they have "tame bots," probably they are tame on a per domain basis. But if a hosting company is hosting several domains on a shared server, Google's bots could easily hit each of the domains individually at the same time in a "tame way" but the aggregation of doing them simultaneously could be far more intensive.

So the bottom line in this long post is this: If your listings in Google go away, it could be caused by your hosting company blocking Google bot IP addresses thereby preventing the bots from crawling your site. I would not assume that just because your hosting company is "ept" (or good at what they do) that they could never block Google bot IPs.

Hi faverr,

Google has many different IPs and will try to access your site through a variety of IPs over many days before they finally give up and drop you from their index.

If you site was de-listed because googlebot's IPs were blocked that would mean that a large number of Google's IPs were being blocked for many days. This was no one time error that got corrected within hours.

The Googlebot always identifies itself through the "user-agent" string. So you would have to totally ignore the user agent string and ignore lookup results to "accidentally block" the Googlebot. You would have to make these errors repeatedly and for many days to cause a de-listing.

I certainly don't want someone blocking IP address to my website if they don't know what they are doing or can't be bothered to check to see who they are blocking.

It takes a substantial amount of incompetence to achieve this and I personally am not tolerant of a hosting company that "accidentally" gets my websites de-listed.

I guess everyone has different standards and different levels of tolerance.

[faverr]

Don Burk,

In your most recent post you raise some very good points. However, I imagine the "user-agent" can be spoofed, which means a hosting company that relies on that string for identification could leave themselves open to an attack by a spoofing rogue visitor.

I certainly agree that if the blocking of Google got IPs happens again with HostGator, I'll be thinking very seriously about moving on.

Also, the main point of my original post was not so much to justify any particular hosting company. My point was to raise awareness that if a person's web sites drop out of Google indexing, this is one possibility to consider. I've not heard of this problem much as being a possibility, so if someone overlooks this possibility, they can be left frustratingly scratching their head wondering how to get re-listed.

This particular problem -- unlike so many Google-related problems -- is at least one that someone can do something about. Whether that is getting a hosting company to fix the problem or is moving to a new host, it at least allows some possibility of recovering their SEO strength that they might have spent lots of time and money building.

I'm really hoping the word gets out, because this problem is not an obvious thing to look for unless you know to look for it. I only figured it out, because I was setting up a bunch of new web sites, and I figured there was really something unusual going on when Google Webmaster Tools was complaining that it could not access most of them.

[scene4u]

So long as you update your site regularly with good quality content and build links to the site then you should never go into the Sandbox and even if you do then you should soon be able to escape it.

[desmondchui]

is that once get in sandbox, no way out?

[David]

I guess I'm guilty of this as well...

You guys are replying based on the thread topic (that I started)


If you scroll up to see some of the earlier reply's you'll see that Don Burk informed us that there ISN'T a sandbox to get in...

it's a SEO urban legend it seems.

We're (according to Don and what he said makes a lot of sense to me, especially after hearing the head honcho from Google himself talk about it on a YouTube interview)

... what we're colloquially referring to as the "sand box" is one of two things:

• All sites rank high when they're new (freshness factor gives us a little 'bump')
• when the 'freshness' bump wears off, how our site ranks is determined by how well we did our homework prior to submitting

If we 'over did it' with the poor quality back link strategies, we get put into the 'supplemental index'.

so.. perhaps that supplemental-ness could be construed as the 'sand box'?

Index 'purgatory' for insufficient preparation?

Did I describe that correctly Don?

[AndyBlackSEO]

Just build your links gradually. The sandbox is just an occurance of having a new site. It's a time thing i'm afraid. Google needs to 'trust' your site first before it will allow you to rank for competitive keywords.

This doesn't mean that you can rank at the top for less competitive, long tailed keywords though. Why not conventrate on them. In time your site will naturally rank better for the more competitive keywords once you gain a bit of trust and page rank from Google.

Andy

** Just read the post above. The sandbox is debatable. I don't think of it as a sandbox to be honest... it is more an effect of curcumstances.