Google Sandbox Effect - An Urban Myth
Does your SEO company tell you lies? If they blame Google for your sites' failure they are lying.
SEO Tip: Because spammers use "throw away domains" some search engines now favor websites where the domain has been registered for more than one year.
We are going to cp. off a lot of other SEO companies (at least the bad ones) but it needs to be said:
Ask for your money back if:
... an SEO company has told you that they did their part and the reason your website is not performing is because it was sandboxed.
...an SEO company optimized your website and has told you "now just wait 3-6 months to see what happens" ask for your money back. Although it can take months to get great positioning, daily site updates and SEO tweaking will dramatically speed up the process. There is no such thing as a "fix it and forget it" approach to mastering search engines.
... If you paid for "SEM" services and your website is still not showing up on page 1 on Google after a month or two.
... If your website is not indexed by at least 2 major search engines -- and one HAS to be Google after 30-60 days.
If an SEO company fails to get your site indexed there are only two reasons why:
1. They promised you unrealistic results that they cannot deliver; or
2. They did not do the job right.
Don't Throw Good Money After Bad
Adding keyword metadata (the services most bad SEO companies push) to a poorly done website is a waste of your money and is not going to help.
Robots look at your entire website - not just the metadata. To get indexed and climb the search engine ladder your entire website must be solid from the sites' structure to content to, of course, the search engine optimization.
So easy a caveman can do it.
Getting robots to visit your site is just not that hard and involves no special skills.
Getting your website to come up in top positions in search engines is hard.
To be competitive against the 9 billion (according to Google) other websites out there in Cyberspace your content and how your site is laid out and works has a lot to do with SEO.
Lies Your SEO Company Tells You
Hercules (above) was reported to be the largest dog in the world.
But the photo was edited to make the dog appear larger than it really is.
Google's practice of ignoring all new websites also appears bigger than it really is.
There really is a very big dog named Hercules and there really is such a thing as a new website having trouble getting listed in search engines.
But the truth behind new site failure has nothing to do with Google sandboxing but with the number of new websites launched daily that are just not ready for prime time.
The Google sandbox effect: The making of an SEO urban legend to fleece unwary consumers
By Lahle Wolfe
What is sandboxing? Sandboxing is a term used to describe the practice of search engines (in particular, Google) automatically segregating all new domains into an imaginary sandbox.
While "sandboxed" new domains are not indexed, and if they are, will not appear in top search engine results simply because they are new websites.
The legend begins: Google gets blamed for bad SEO work
I have never seen evidence that Google punishes new domains with automatic sandboxing. And, Google publicly denies the practice of sandboxing and I believe them because I have consistently seen plenty of evidence to support their denials.
But Google (and other search engines) do give priority to websites that are complete and polished when they go live. It is because the best sites get more attention, and so many new sites often are poorly done, that the urban legend of Google sandboxing was born.
When people could not figure out why their precious websites were being ignored they turned to chat rooms, forums, and "the experts." It was easier to blame someone else (Google) than to identify and fix website problems.
SEO Scam artists emerge
I am sad to acknowledge that the sandboxing myth gave birth to a tremendous breeding ground for scam artists. What was once valued as a mysterious, elite and highly-skilled profession, the search engine optimization and Internet marketing industry was overrun with people not smart enough to know how to really fix website problems -- but smart enough to take peoples' money and put the blame on Google when a website did not perform.
With Google as a scapegoat, and new websites desperate to get ranked, the equivalent of an SEO porn industry was born.
A classic (and recent) example of an SEO marketing scam
One of my clients was told by a major attorney marketing company that their website was sandboxed and to be patient because there was nothing more they could do. The lawyer SEO company continued to bill them each month for "SEO services" on a website that had not even had one page indexed by a major search engine -- after 7 months. Additionally, the original SEO work that search engines did not respond to was never even tweaked to try and get better ranking.
All this time the client was told by these respected professionals, "sorry, it's a sandbox thing."
But the truth was that my clients' website had been severely penalized because it contained more then 2,000 bad internal links (seriously - 2,000 404 errors) and had broken site navigation, malfunctioning JavaScripts, and chimpanzee SEO work. The fact that their SEO company had mirrored my clients' website three times in a black-hat effort to get better visibility was nothing short of shameful (and, it backfired miserably, too.)
When I rebuilt their website, demolished the mirrored domains, cleaned up all 404 errors, added some new content and relaunched it an "impossible" thing happened. The website completely recovered in less than two weeks and more than a year later remains on page one of Google for numerous keyword phrases.
Not only were search engines forgiving when the bad stuff was fixed (the site had been completely banned for multiple domain mirroring) but it was indexed quickly, and once robots could crawl and digest the site, it made it into the top ten across all four search engines -- in less than 72 hours.
My point is not how rockin' my web skills are. My point is that when a site fails it is almost always attributable to some human failing, not search engine robots blind hatred of all new websites.
If you build it, Google will come
Chances are that not long after you launched your new website Google robots did visit it within hours to days - not months. Robots are curious and do nothing but seek out new information and process it.
No SEO company owns bragging rights to simply getting a robot to visit your site because robots will attempt to crawl you site at least once without any prompting.. But a good SEO marketing company can help you by designing and optimizing your site so robots can crawl it, understand the information, and index it properly -- and come back for more information when you update your website.
If your website is not being indexed or has been indexed and is not showing up in search queries, chances are your site was not offering robots enough to get excited about when they first checked you out.
If your SEO company made you promises and has not delivered results, do not let them get away with blaming Google.