Google Sandbox: Why New Sites Are More Difficult to Get Ranked

There’s been a lot of talk about why new sites are so difficult to get ranked. One of the proposed reasons has been because Google keeps new sites in a holding area (aka “sandbox”) until it can determine a rank for the site. During this time, webmasters will notice that their site will only rank for non-competitive keywords.

One of the reasons it is thought Google does this is because of the proliferation of spam sites that try to game Google rankings. It’s easy to set up a website in a few minutes and populate it with nonsense content, keywords, and the like. Spammers have capitalized on the ease of setting up these sites, generating quick advertising revenue, and moving onto the next site once the spam site is discovered and shut out of search engines (or shut down completely).

To combat these spammy sites, Google holds all new sites for a certain time period until it can determine that the sites offer valuable content and should be indexed.

On April 26, Google filed a patent describing what sounds a lot like this “sandbox” effect that search marketers have debated and discussed for the last few years. SEONewsBlog.com has the breakdown on what is covered, including what factors determine how long the site is held.

Some things that matter include:

• when the domain name was registered – older domains are preferred
• the rate of link growth – how quickly the site has gotten other sites to link to it
• how often the site is updated
• if the site buys links from other sites or tries to get lots of links quickly
• the anchor text of links – what the keywords in the links that point back to your site
• traffic statistics of the website
• how often users click through to the site from search results
• who your web hosting provider is and whether they have a reputation for hosting spammy sites
• your site’s ranking history
• how often users bookmark the site

So, as you can see, there are a lot of factors that go into ranking your website. It’s not just your “meta tags” or whether or not you use keywords in your site’s content.

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