Mar 20, 2009
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Many times webmasters feel that Google is out to get them or to make their life miserable by not improving their website search engine rankings. Many times there are websites especially new websites that will seem to experience no growth in the rankings even though you are continually working on the site.
There have been several articles on the infamous Google Sandbox which is where Google does not really pay to much attention to your website and could really care less how much work you do, at least that is what it seems.
Typically the websites that go into the Google Sandbox are websites that are new, have changed over, or have not been used for awhile. The basic idea behind the sandbox is to make websites prove their value.
To better understand this you have to first realize that Google is not to concerned with having to crawl your site, index your site, and rank your site as much as you are. They have two indexes: the main index and the supplemental index and they are more than willing to place some websites in the supplemental index.
If you are continually working on your website and see no growth the typical amount of time of the Google Sandbox is around 6 months. The best thing to do if you think your website is in the sandbox is to first make sure that Google is at least indexing your website. If your website is being indexed then that tells you that you are not being penalized and on Google’s bad list.
Next the best thing to do is to continually add fresh original content on a regular basis at least 3 times a week. The faster and more continuous you add content the more Google will crawl your website and start to figure out that your website is a good website.
When building backlinks you will want to be especially careful not to build or grow backlinks to fast. Again remember it is most often that new websites go into the sandbox so Google can tell if your inbound links look unnatural especially if it is a new website.
A great way to build links is to web 2.0 properties like a Squidoo lens, or a Wetpaint page, or a WordPress.com blog, or Blogger and then build links into those properties that are about your website. As you build your network and link those properties to each other and build links to them which talk about your main website you will see favor in Google as not all of your links are coming into your main website. Also using web 2.0 properties that have authority is especially a necessity when you are in the sandbox.
Continually grow your website and give Google what they want which is you to prove that your website is of great worth and that they should start to rank you better.
These are just a few tips to help you prove your worth to Google as they put you in the sandbox. If you do these things do not be to concerned as you will come out of the sandbox and look very well in the search engines.