Citrus Skies

Google's Sandbox in Action

2 February 2007

Anyone involved in web development will have heard of the Google Sandbox, where new sites are placed, for a variable amount of time, before Google properly ranks the sites and they show up in common keyword searches.

There’s some dispute over whether a set Sandbox policy actually exists at Google. Some argue that the observed effects are just the result of Google’s page ranking algorithm. However, all will agree that it can be frustrating when you’re doing every “right” to help your search engine rankings, but your site is nowhere to be seen.

I’ve witnessed the Sandbox effect on past projects, with new sites and domains, but I had never personally encountered the effect with existing domains or established sites. Until now.

I’m working on a project that revives an existing domain name, the site for which has been dormant for quite some time. Up until Wednesday (2 days ago) the site appeared top of the Google search results for the words in its domain (not common search terms by any means). What’s more, the search results actually contained a snippet from the new site’s text.

By last night, however, all that had changed. Not only has the site disappeared from the search rankings, but when you do find it (using a “site:domain.com” query) its back to having a snippet of the old site’s text. Even Google’s cached copy of the home page is now a version from late last year.

So, if like me, you still had some doubts about the Sandbox affecting existing domains, there’s the proof – change the site content significantly and you’re back to square one. What will be interesting will be to watch how long the site is held in the Sandbox, to see if the age of the domain makes any difference.

Article Tags: domains, new site, sandbox, seo, google