Age of a website matters – especially to Google. If you have a site registered since the early 90’s, chances are (if you worked at it) the site maintains pretty good rankings up till now. It’s also likely that they will outrank most of the newer sites that would sprout up along the way. It’s a matter of seniority.
While it may be incredulous that a search engine would want to deter a new website from appearing in the SERPs, this phenomenon, now referred to as the Sandbox Effect, is all too real for SEO experts.
The term “Sandbox Effect” was originally coined by Barry Schwarz of SEORoundTable. Newer sites are said to be placed in a sandbox (where they play nicely away from other “real” sites). These newer sites have their ratings placed on hold until such time is deemed appropriate before real search engine rankings on Google will appear. These same websites could get top rankings for semi-competitive keyword phrases on Yahoo and MSN yet not be anywhere visible in the search engine results for Google.
SEOs discovered last year that it took an increasingly greater amount of time to get sites ranked in the top ten search engine result pages. Some see this as Google’s way of preventing newer websites from ranking in the SERPs until they have proven their viability to exist for “x” number of months.
Some believe the idea behind the Sandbox is to prevent the artificial manipulation of search engine rankings for a new website. Others believe it prevents the use of mini-networks and other multi-site strategies intended to artificially inflate link popularity by delaying the actual ranking of these new sites. The mini-network strategy is a technique webmasters use to maximize the effect of the links exchanged between sites by splitting up what would normally be on a single site into multiple sites or by building a series of mini-sites that are only designed with the sole aim to increase link popularity to the main site. This delay means that site owners would have to take a long-term view and be able to sustain cost for the number of sites created for this purpose.
The waiting period appears to be between 90 and 120 days before a site would start gaining search engine rank from reciprocal linking or other forms of back-linking. This would deter would be spammers from getting spammy sites into the SERPs corrupting the web search experience. While this may be a good thing, it also prevents legitimate website owners from getting a good quality site ranked and noticed.
According to recent reports by respected members of the SEO community at the latest Search Engine Strategies conference held in San Jose, a top Google engineer admitted to the Sandbox’s existence. He apparently said that all sites are subject to a “probationary” period of sorts regardless of its merit and this period can last anywhere from six months to 12 months.
This “probationary” period is used to determine how users like a new site and who links to it, etc. This was not supposed to be related to Google’s desire to drive users towards its Adwords program (pay-per-click) thereby generating more income for big G.
Here are some simple tips to use immediately for new sites:
- Start NOW. If you put off setting up a site until your business was all set to take orders, or for your office to be fully organized, or any other reason, don’t wait an longer. Put together a simple site with a few pages and start the aging process of your site. Begin the process before you are ready for any ecommerce sales.
- During this period, do not discontinue your link building activities, your rank will eventually appear.
- Use natural link building techniques as discussed in an earlier article.
- Avoid building an excessive number of inbound links in any month.