At the beginning of 2004, a new term appeared among SEO experts – Google SandBox. This is the name of a new Google spam filter that excludes new sites from search results. The work of the SandBox filter results for virtually any phrase of sites that have high-quality unique content and which are promoted using legitimate techniques.
The SandBox is applied only to the English segment of the Internet; sites in other languages are not yet affected by this filter. It is assumed that the aim of the SandBox filter is to exclude spam sites – indeed, no search spammer will be able to wait for months until he gets the necessary results. However, many perfectly valid new sites suffer the consequences. So far, there is no precise information as to what the SandBox filter actually is. Here are some assumptions based on practical SEO experience:
- SandBox is a filter that is applied to new sites. A new site is put in the sandbox and is kept there for some time until the search engine starts treating it as a normal site.
- SandBox is a filter applied to new inbound links to new sites. There is a fundamental difference between this and the previous assumption: the filter is not based on the age of the site, but on the age of inbound links to the site. In other words, Google treats the site normally but it refuses to acknowledge any inbound links to it unless they have existed for several months.
It is hard to say which of these assumptions is accurate; it is quite possible that they are both right.The SandBox is applied only to the English segment of the Internet; sites in other languages are not yet affected by this filter. It is assumed that the aim of the SandBox filter is to exclude spam sites – indeed, no search spammer will be able to wait for months until he gets the necessary results. However, many perfectly valid new sites suffer the consequences. So far, there is no precise information as to what the SandBox filter actually is. Here are some assumptions based on practical SEO experience:
- SandBox is a filter that is applied to new sites. A new site is put in the sandbox and is kept there for some time until the search engine starts treating it as a normal site.
- SandBox is a filter applied to new inbound links to new sites. There is a fundamental difference between this and the previous assumption: the filter is not based on the age of the site, but on the age of inbound links to the site. In other words, Google treats the site normally but it refuses to acknowledge any inbound links to it unless they have existed for several months.
The site may be kept in the sandbox from 3 months to a year or more. It has also been noticed that sites are released from the sandbox in batches. All sites created within a certain time period are put into the same group and they are eventually all released at the same time. Thus, individual sites in a group can spend different times in the sandbox depending where they were in the group capture-release cycle.
