I admit it. For the past 2 years or so, I've been preaching the Sandbox Gospel. "Hey, if you have a brand new site, expect an age filter in Google that will restrict your site from showing up just about anywhere for a minimum of 6 mos."

Granted, new sites can be a pain to rank, but evidence is coming out that it may not be quite as bad as we thought. In fact, the infamous sandbox may have gone the way of the Loch Ness Monster.

Two New Sites
I have have two new customers that have launched brand new sites in the last 60-90 days. For each of them, I created the expectation that the optimization and ranking process would be long and not something to expect in 30 days.

To my surprise, both sites are now Top 10 for pretty competitive phrases amongst sites that have been around quite awhile. This was a nice surprise to say the least, and went squarely against past efforts.

Search Engine Strategies, Chicago
I didn't go to SES in Chitown this year, but I certainly kep tabs on what was going on. Here's a snippet from the Organic Listings Forum:

They don’t think there are sandbox issues anymore. The engines are constantly “turning the knob” between letting spam in and letting white hat in. The problem with not letting spam in is that white hat gets caught in the mix. If you get links from established sites you are not going to have a problem. Your site has to look natural. If you look unnatural you will get ignored. Look for conduit links… links that connect you to intermediate sites that have links from big sites.

Sounds about right. Trust is the key, kids.

Labels: google sandbox, search engine strategies