Do you believe the Sandbox exists?

Unless the sandbox is noticeably shorter for so-called "good sites with good content", then if the spammers are just as patient as everyone else, then why would it make any difference? Eventually they will get out like everyone else.

I guess I don't understand the importance of the sandbox, or maybe I question its existence. A lot of people claim to have great sites with high quality content and still get the box for 6 months. Other people have sites with questionable content and do just fine without ever getting sandboxed.

Coincidence is often mistaken for causality, especially when it comes to the 'sandbox'.

I think the sandbox is just another way of saying your not there yet. People think they are in the sandbox, then the next day they are able to find their keywords. If and a big IF, it exists and google is really catagorizing a site as bad, then I don't think they are going to forgive that site in a couple of days. My guess is that the sandbox is a myth. If not, then most people that think they are sandboxed aren't. I don't think google puts you in a time out like we do our kids. Just my opinion on it.

I believe it does. I used to work in this site which entered sandbox for 3 months. All the keywords rankings were gone, but the spider still visited and indexed pages.

Your experience makes some great points Bcrewse1. I think that you can be penalized for scamming, or other things, but I'm not sold on a sandbox for backlinking. It is way to easy to screw with other peoples sites if this were true. I used the same piece of content twice on my site by accident and my site disapeered. I figured it out and removed the 1 page, updating it with 100% fresh content I wrote myself off the top of my head and bam, it was right back where I started a day after the site was crawled again.

I really believe you can be penalized easier by google for the value of content you have on your site, but there are so many people here in this forum that have proven me wrong I suppose. I tell you one thing though, good content is going to bring customers back and that is what were all interested in at the end of the day!

I had a brandnew site where i overdid it a little with links and bookmarking, it took like 5 days to get indexed. I was convinced i am/was in the sandbox. But i added high quality content like crazy...and now i am already pretty high up in Google for some search terms i was shooting for.

So..again i have no idea whether it exists or not. It can also be that Google does indeed *initially* penalize new sites with a suspicious high nr. of links - but then if google re-crawls and sees the site is NOT a spammer site but has indeed value it might release the site again...respective shorten the sand-box time.

So..no matter what..the best thing you can do is add good content. I agree.

It's sort of like asking if ghosts exist- who knows.

Just try and promote your site effectively w/o trying to be too tricky and hope for the best results long-term.

After seeing tons of people on this forum show that they achieved high PR with a ton of links within less than a month, I highly doubt there is a sandbox. If you have a nice site with a bunch of links you will be rewarded period. For those who say not to build links too fast, I say hogwash. I build them as fast as I can and never have been penalized.

Sandbox is Good and Bad. Search engine optimization Experts and Link builders work with some caution because of Sandbox. They dont want be a victim. If you become a victim it is really bad because all our good jobs are undone for a period of time.

Hi GeorgR,

The term "Google Sandbox" was coined by Toolman over at Webmasterworld back in 2004. He was commenting on how he use to be able to get a new site ranking right away with proper SEO, but noticed a change in Google's algorithm that seemed to put new websites into a "sandbox" until they have stood the test of time.

Barry Schwartz over at SEORoundtable started to use the term, not long after, to describe the effect of the Freshness Factor (QDF), where a new optimized page might earn a top ranking but then drop off quickly after a few weeks.

Over time, the causes for these effects have been revealed by Google engineers and it was made clear that Google does not have a "Sandbox" but there is a natural "effect" of their algorithm that would cause the "effect" that is perceived as the "sandbox". Immediately thereafter folks in the SEO industry started to referring to it as the "Sandbox Effect".

This "effect" is caused by the weighting of content that has stood the test of time with higher rankings because it has earned trust. This weighting applies equally to all new pages and there is nothing that you do to cause it and therefore nothing you can do to avoid it.

From my own observations I believe that most folks that feel that their website has fallen into a perceived "sandbox" is due to the QDF technology. They mistakenly feel that their new page has earned a top ranking and are upset when they see it drop in rank after the QDF Freshness Factor wears off. Again there is nothing they did to cause the drop it's a natural part of the algorithm and it simply pushes fresh new content to the top of the SERP rankings for a brief period, after which the regular algorithm takes hold.

This is not to say that Google doesn't penalize sites for violating webmaster guidelines. The term "Sandbox Effect" was coined to describe what was happening to new, well optimized, websites that were following Google's guidelines but not ranking because they were new and had not yet earned Google's trust.