Interview with Rand Fishkin about the Google Sandbox - 11/03/05

I've been involved in SEO for about 3 years now, 2 of them on inside of the industry (forums, blogs, etc.). My experience simply stems from an unsatisfactory job that an outsourced SEO was doing for us several years ago. I took the reigns and found it to be a natural fit.

You can think of the sandbox as a testing ground and a way to prevent spam. Google is using the sandbox as a way to keep many new sites that trip their filters (which the SEO community has, of yet, been unable to pin down)out of the top rankings. The most common way you'll notice this is when you search for something very popular and specific in regards to a new website and the results show dozens or even hundreds of pages on the web that link to or mention the site in question but don't see the site/page itself. It's certainly a very frustrating situation for any webmaster, but I believe Google is happy with the results. They throw out the baby with the bathwater but seem to prefer that to having spam rank well.

From a webmaster perspective, it's a bad thing. From Google's perspective it's positive. From the general search public's perspective it's probably something they notice very infrequently and while it may keep some good results from ranking well, it's also limiting spam, so to them it's probably a wash.

Yes. I think that the sandbox is a filter that gets tripped - something told to me by a young search engineer during the Google Dance this past August. SEO techniques like link building and on-page optimization probably have something to do with the sandbox's throttlehold on new sites, although a great many sites get put into it without using any "SEO" tactics at all.

Buy it 12-18 months ahead of time, point a few dozen links there from directories and any relevant sites, throw 2-4 pages of content on it and let it sit. There's really no other good solutions if you're targeting Google traffic. My preference, however, is to avoid Google entirely - if you can build traffic and grow a site without them, by getting community traffic, traffic through links, type-ins, referrals and Yahoo! & MSN traffic, you'll be in good shape. Then, when Google does finally come around, you can do very, very well.

I suspect that they will refine the filters that trip entry, but I'm not sure. I know that they recognize they're currently putting far too many good, high quality sites in, but whether they will fix that or get even stricter will probably be dependent on the decision-makers' preferences
- the senior search engineers. User testing that they conduct may also influence it, as would breakthroughs from Yahoo! or MSN in relevancy (surpassing Google).

I would be more lenient - my view is that some spam in the index is not nearly as bad a thing as Google perceives it to be. I'd much prefer to have those great sites that do get tossed aside now put back in the index. At the same time, I recognize that I don't have access to their data, their user tests, etc. so they may very well have information that I would see and be convinced otherwise. Google isn't doing what's best for webmasters and sites, their customers are the searchers and that's who they cater to.

I love http://del.icio.us - so many cool links every day. I'm also a fan of the recently redesigned Seattle news weekly, http://www.thestranger.com - they've done a great job of making that a local destination site. Some in the search space include http://www.insearchofstuff.com/, which is SEO/M humor, Miislita.com, JimBoykin.com and Stuntdubl.com (from the webuildpages guys), Pat Gavin's linkbuildingblog.com, Kim Krause's http://www.cre8pc.com/blog/ and dozens more. I visit 30-40 SEO/M blogs every week and many of those every day (like threadwatch).