I’ve been hearing increased conjecture about a Yahoo Sandbox, similar to the well known and largely mythical Google Sandbox. People who find it takes many months for their new web site to show up in rankings in Yahoo or Google often assume that these search engines have some sort of “new site filter” that’s keeping them from showing up.

I don’t think that’s it at all. It takes a certain amount of inbound link popularity for these search engines to think your site is worthy of appearing near the top of the list. Not only does it take time to get quality inbound links, but it takes additional time for those links to be all accounted for by the search engines before they accrue any benefit to your site.

Withy that said, and not to denigrate the importance of link popularity in Google, Yahoo is much more weighted in favor of on-page content. If you have plenty of keyword-rich content on lots of value-packed pages (value to the human visitors to your site) then you’ll do better in Yahoo.

There’s been a lot of discussion lately about whether the Google Sandbox is a real phenomenon or just an SEO myth. Regardless of that, a recent article in Search Engine Land promises to hold the key to getting past that hurdle quickly.

Use a less popular version of your keywords.

Make judicious use of keyword modifiers.

Mix up the keywords on your page. Use plural and singular version, employ other variations, too.

Try for long-tail versions of your keywords.

Buy traffic if you need to.

A recent article on Site-Reference.com explains what the author (Bill Platt) thinks the Google Sandbox phenomenon is and how to hasten your web site’s emergence from it. He believes it’s all about link popularity and PageRank. If you can get a new web site’s PageRank into a competitive range quickly enough, you’ll show up just fine in Google’s listings, no matter how new your domain is.

He subjects himself to a testable challenge and sort of proves his point. If the Google Sandbox is a myth, it’s a very persistent one. Just do a search on our blog to see a number of other posts on the subject. Persistent as it is, we have seen some clients’ web sites defy conventional wisdom and appear in Google’s results more quickly than expected.

Google’s Sandbox and Google’s TrustRank are often discussed in webmaster forums. What are they? And how do they influence your web site rankings on Google? What can you do to get out of the sandbox or to get a high TrustRank?

What are the Sandbox and Google’s TrustRank?

The Sandbox and Google’s TrustRank are part of Google’s ranking filters. A very important factor for the ranking factors in Google is time. The age of your web site influences your rankings as well as the age of the various web sites that link to your web site. In addition, Google how long other web sites have been linking to your site and how your inbound links grow over time, etc.

If you have a new domain name, you may find that  it’s more difficult to get high rankings on Google. Google doesn’t know your web site yet, so it it doesn’t know if it can trust your web site or not. For that reason, new web sites usually have to deal with more filters than old web sites. It can happen that a new site gets great rankings and then it disappears from the rankings for some months. This phenomenon is called the sandbox effect, and we’ve seen it strike clients of ours on occasion

The Sandbox and Trustrank are two sides of the same coin

The Sandbox and TrustRank are just names for a set of filters. The Sandbox effect basically means that new web sites disappear from the search results for some time after getting good rankings. It probably means that time filters have been applied to a web site. (I say “probably” because Google (and the other search engines for that matter) doesn’t reveal how its filters work. We can only try to infer what the filters are and what they do from what we can observe happening to our web sites and those of our clients.)

A high TrustRank means that Google has learned to trust a web site. That means the site is probably is several years old, a number of reputable sites link to it, it has a good inbound link history and it hasn’t used spam techniques in the past. (By “spam”, I don’t mean that in the sense of the email spam we all receive, but search engine spam, which is the use of shady techniques to try and fool the search engines into giving your site an undeservedly high ranking.)

A web site that is in the Sandbox probably hasn’t earned a high TrustRank yet. Conversely, a web site with a high TrustRank is unlikely to be put in the Sandbox.

What does this mean to your web site?

The older your web site is, the better. It seems that Google’s filters tend to be stricter with new domain names so it’s more difficult to get high rankings with new domain names. New domains have to prove that they are trustworthy before they can get high rankings. This is one reason we often counsel our clients not to change their domain name just to  get one with a keyword in the name. The loss of TrustRank greatly outweighs any advantage of having that keyword in your domain name.

You need  show Google that your web site is trustworthy. Get good inbound links to your web site and keep on working on inbound links over time. The longer other web sites link to your site the more likely it is that you’ll get high rankings. And if new web sites establish links to your site on an ongoing basis, that helps, too.

You should optimize the links to your site. If the right web sites link to your site, you show Google that your web site can be trusted.

If you have a new domain name, you have to show Google that your web site can be trusted first. You can do this by getting the right links to your web site. That’s the reason Rank Magic always provides a link to our clients early in the process; our link comes from a page that’s been there a long time, has an excellent PageRank and a well established TrustRank. That allows our site to add a measure of trustworthiness to our client’s site.

Some words about the Google Sandbox. A reputed “purgatory” for new web sites where they have to bide their time before showing up in Google’s results.

Q. Our main web site has enjoyed good rankings in Google for years. We’ve created a spin-off business with its own web site, which we’ve optimized for the search engines just like our main web site. However, after six months, the new site doesn’t show up (not anywhere in at least the top 120 pages!) for any of our keywords. Much less relevant web sites rank much better. What gives?

A. Well, if your new site is only six months old, you may still be the victim of the Google Sandbox. More correctly, we should call it the Google aging delay.

According to current wisdom in the SEO community, the aging delay seems to average about 9 months, so you may need a little more patience.

Submitting to Google isn’t the answer. Your web site needs to build trust, links, and general credibility. And if you’re in a particularly competitive arena, things can take awhile even without the aging delay. Fortunately, there doesn’t seem to be quite such an aging factor in MSN, Yahoo, or the other major search engines.

That’s the general wisdom, but I have to admit that some of our clients that started with a brand new web site have shown up in Google within three months or less, so I’m not totally convinced the Google Sandbox is real. It may just be that it takes awhile to develop inbound links, and then it takes awhile for Google to recognize those links. And then, that recognition may not be factored into actual search results for awhile. All those “awhiles” add up.

There’s an interesting forum discussion on this at HighRankings.com.

SEO News has recently done a test to see how or whether the major search engines delay indexing and listing new web sites for a period of time. Google has been known to do this, and that behavior has been unofficially termed “the Google Sandbox”.

SEO News reports discovering that all engines seem to delay indexing (including in their results) of new domain names for at least thirty days. Google so far has delayed indexing their new test web site for at least 60 days since first crawling it (the site is still not indexed). AskJeeves has crawled thousands of pages, while indexing none of them. MSN indexes faster than all engines but requires a robots.txt file (more on this soon!). Yahoo‘s spider crawls on again off again for 60 days, but indexes only six of total 15,000 or more pages crawled to date. You’ll find their full story here.

This may be of concern to owners of brand new web sites, but take heart! A client of ours, a wedding celebrant in the NYC/NJ area, got a call from someone who found her in a search engine within two weeks of when we launched her web site and submitted it to the search engines!

Thanks to Jill Whalen of HighRankings.com for this clear discussion.

Purgatory for Brand New Sites

For those who aren’t familiar with the aging delay and the sandbox, you’ll want to note that there is a lot of disagreement over what causes a site to be thrown in the sandbox. However, based on my own observations and the experiences of some trusted SEO friends, it’s my belief that the sandbox is basically a purgatory database where Google places certain URLs based on a variety of predetermined criteria. (Much of this is spelled out in the first part of the patent application.)

Basically, if you have a brand new domain/website, it will automatically land in the sandbox regardless of anything that you do with it. Your new website will be stuck there for an unspecified period of time (averaging around 9 months these days) and it will not rank highly in Google for any keyword phrases that might bring it any decent traffic. Yes, it can sometimes rank highly for the company name, or the names of the people who run the company. It may also show up in Google for a few additional phrases that other sites are not focusing on within their content. But new domains will not show up in Google’s natural results for even slightly competitive keyword phrases until they are removed from the sandbox.

The full discussion of this topic can be found in Jill’s really informative newsletter, a copy of which can be found in her archives at www.highrankings.com/issue142.htm.

There’s a phenomenon with Google that’s termed the Sandbox, which is a place where Google sends brand new web sites to play nicely for awhile before allowing them to mingle with the other sites in their rankings. One of the earliest descriptions is from about a year ago in Web Pro News.

What this means is that our initial Keyword Status Report, which we run about two months after submitting a newly optimized site to the search engines, may show disappointing results for brand new sites in Google, AOL, Netscape and some other search engines. Sites that may be newly optimized but which have existed on the Web for some time may not be affected.

We’ve seen sites that caused us some consternation on the initial Keyword Status Report until we checked them again in another couple of months to find that they’d nicely popped up onto the first page in Google.

The moral of the story

If you have a brand new web site, you may need a little something more than good optimization and link building:

Patience.