Try doing site:yourdomain.com -if you're still listed, then your site is not sandboxed.

Don't worry about google dance or sandbox. You will be fine. Just add content on a regular basis and get backlinks. Time spent checking your Google ratings is time wasted.

I agree whole-heartedly. If a search for site:yourdomain.com shows some results, then you have not been banned from Google. So long as your site has not been banned, you are still in the running to achieve page one search results.



The flip answer to your question is that one is real and one is imaginary. ;-)

Be prepared, because people are going to flip on me over my opinion on the Sandbox.

The Google Dance is real. That is when you check your results over the course of a day or week, and you see that your ranking is moving all over the place.

For example, I posted a new blog post a couple days back that was designed to target about 4 keyword phrases. Within just a few hours, Google had crawled the page. Eight hours after posting, my preferred target phrase was at #201. Twelve hours after posting, it was at #132. Twenty-four hours after posting, it was ranked #96. This morning - 36 hours after posting - it was not in the top 1000.

Some people would suggest that this means that my blog post was "sandboxed".

Just a few minutes ago, I found my post back at #321, so even though it was gone for a few hours, it is now back in the listings.

My second target keyword phrase for the same blog post was not in the top 1000, at the eight hour mark after posting. Twelve hours after posting, it was in the 500's. Twenty-four hours after posting, it was #17. Thirty-Six hours after posting, it was #6. And just a few minutes ago, it had dropped to #7.

This is the very definition of the Google Dance.

Your ranking position in the SERPS is always on the move. It goes up and down, as Google adds and removes data from its databases, and it recalculates the perceived value of your page.

Now, I am going to tweak some people off... The Google Sandbox is not real.

The theory behind the Sandbox is that Google will honor your page with some ranking, for a very short time, then Google will drop your listing into oblivion, never to be seen again.

The Sandbox is, I believe, one of those myths created by an SEO Professional to explain to a customer why their page dropped out of the SERPS for a particular keyword phrase...

But think about this...

Google may show 40 million search results on a particular query, but they will only show up to 1000 of those for any search phrase. As you drill down into their results, they shorten and lower the number of results they are willing to show you.

For example. On my primary target phrase, page one says that there are 1 to 100 of 265 million results. At the bottom of the page, I have links to eight pages in Google for that phrase. If I immediately click to page 8, they show me 501-581.

If I keep clicking Next Page, the number of pages keep shrinking. When I hit page 3, then my options drop to 7 pages. When I get to page 6, that is the end of the road with results 501-581.

All my absence from the SERPS really says is that my page does not score in the top 581 results...

The argument is often that if I cannot see my page in the top 581 results for a particular phrase, then my page is sandboxed! In theory, it has been dropped into the oblivion of darkness at Google, never to surface again, without a miracle from God...

Interestingly, while my main keyword phrase would suggest that the Sandbox Proponents are right and that there is a Sandbox, my page was still sitting at #6 on another keyword phrase, while it was absent from the SERPS on another keyword phrase.

The Google Sandbox in my mind is just an excuse that high-paid SEO professionals tell their clients, as the excuse for a page dropping out of the search results for a particular keyword. After all, if their customers continue to believe in the mystical sandbox, then their customers will not blame them for the failure to deliver the Search Marketing results the customer was hoping to achieve. Once the drop in ranking can be attributed to Google's inner-workings, then the customer cannot be mad at the SEO provider and everybody can be happy again. ;-)

Of course, when Google only shows 581 results out of 265 million results, there are going to be 264 million, 999 thousand, and 419 upset people. Not everyone can get all of their pages ranked in the visible SERPs, for all of their target keywords. The odds are statistically against us, no matter what we are trying to get ranked in Google or any other search engine.

I create a lot of content online, and I possess more than my fair share of page one rankings in Google. There are some keyword phrases that I would kill to achieve a page one ranking for, but those phrases are hyper-competitive, so I just keep plugging away to try to move my ranking up. There are other keyword phrases where very little effort is actually required to achieve page one results.

If any page on the Internet has a single keyword phrase resolving to the visible SERPs, then it is not really ignored by Google. And if your page does not hold a place in the visible SERPs for your preferred target keyword phrase, then it is simply not relevant enough in Google's algorithms at this time.

I phrased that last sentence deliberately, "simply not relevant enough in Google's algorithms at this time", because with a little or a lot of work, any page can be brought out of the shadows into the light of day within Google's SERPs.

I have always believed the Google Sandbox to be a SEO Myth, and anyone who cares to try will be hard-pressed to convince me otherwise.

Thanks guys for the in insight. I guess i have to move on and be patient. And of course, do my usual content and backlinking stuff. After all, at the end backlinks and good content matters.
Thanks.

So you can't get de-indexed?

So, you are saying there is no such thing as a Sandbox, but you CAN get nuked entirely?

Becomming sandboxed, means Google deindexes your website, therefore you are no longer indexed by Google, at all (In public anyway, I'm sure Google don't delete the data) - The google dance is just a huge decrease in SERP ranking, then a huge increase later on (Well, thats what you hope for), the google dance is there to test websites, to see if they are infact any good and weather they just die out because, well they aren't good engouth for a first page ranking.

I think Google Sandbox Does Exits! It is NOT a Myth.

However, very rarely your site get caught in this filter - totally de-indexed and even using the "site:" or "info:" command can't find you anywhere!

Usually new site will encounter such a problem, to solve this is easy. Throw bunch of authority backlinks to it, with enough trust rank, your site will be out of the sandbox!

If you still can't get out, PM me, I'll show you a cool trick.

Kok Choon

my question is:

google penalty is real (the big G slaps you and drops your site 30+ or even 300+ serp spots)

so isn't google penalty = google sandbox???

if that is the case then google sand box is alive and kicking!

A site is sandboxed when it is new and does not rank for keyword phrases that are not incredibly competitive (such as a unique company name) in Google after making the page "search engine friendly" and after being indexed.

@ hidohebhi

What have you been doing as far as backlinking goes for your site. Hitting a site with lots of backlinks and then stopping completely (as in... on vacation) seems to be an effective way of experiencing the "google dance".

I think if you continue to backlink with quality and diversity in your backlinks you should be able to see an improvement in your ranking and more "stickiness" with regards to the dance.

if you read this forum there are many arguments to support the existence of sandbox. revenues have fallen and so are the traffic. there must be some truth in it.

i have 2 Blog on Blogspot custom domain with Sandbox,..and then i'm trying to move my blog on My Self Hosting,..then my Blog listed by google.

Hi all,

What about this then. I have a site thats over a year old and for most of that year it was on google page one and pos 3-6 for my main keyword, we are talking low to med competition here. The url that was ranking was not my homepage but an inner page. To get that url there all i did was a few EZA and some profile links as well as crapy blog comments.

Now i didnt touch this site or do any backlinks to it for about 8 months. Two weeks ago i decided to go back to the site and pretty it up a bit and put an opt-in box above the fold.

I then joined an article network with 50 good PR blogs to upload some of my articles to. All with well spun content and all with unique titles.

I also pinged the urls that these articles went on, didnt do this all in one day but over a course of a week.

And my results are: The url that was on page one pos 3-6 has now been de-indexed!!
Not the site but only that url! any ideas as to how to get it back up?

Cheers
mike

google dance : it's only temporary of reindexing because there is some site that extreme optimise with some keyword. It's okay if your site good link building

Sandbox: Google indicated if you site a spam.