Sunday, January 25, 2009

How Long does the Google Sandbox Last

By Brent Sweet

If you know anything about search engine optimization then you have probably gotten word of the Google sandbox. The sandbox is a thing that nobody knows for sure if it exists. It is a filter that people believe will prevent your new site from achieving the ranking it deserves because it is new to the Google index.

Does it exist? I dont really know. The only way to tell is to do such good optimization that it would put your site at number one in a single day. I am pretty sure that nobody can do that.

My thing is I had a site that got to the first page of Google for a competitive word in less than thirty days. I will tell you that about 2 weeks after registering the domain I was indexed at about 110 and then I jumped to 40. Is that the sandbox? Maybe. But the key is 2 weeks after that I was at number 10. I think that may have been a result of increased optimization efforts, not a sandbox.

In conclusion, I think the sandbox is not there. If it does exist it doesn't take a site long to get out of it if you know how to optimize offsite correctly. I don't think there is anybody out there that can expect going into it that they should be on page 1 in less than 30 days. Most places say 3-6 months.

I think the sandbox is the fact that it takes a little time to outrank the sites that are older and have been ranked for a while. I mean to get a top ten ranking, you have to knock someone else off!

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