How To Escape Google Sandbox?

"Google Sandbox theory" - It is one of the most confusing issue that webmasters have to deal with while trying to optimize their new sites for high search engine rankings. The reason why the "Google Sandbox theory" is confusing is that it is just a theory, and is without official confirmations from Google that it actually exists. Without being able to verify the existence of the Sandbox theory, much less its features, it becomes very hard to devise strategies to combat its effects.

The term "Google Sandbox theory" came into existence around early 2004, when webmasters around the world began to notice a pattern with new websites, whose domain names were registered around this period. The pattern was that new sites, even after being optimized and having lot of quality inbound links, were not ranking well for their selected keywords. Also in few cases new websites (websites that came into existence during early 2004) that ranked highly for certain keywords, were either dropped from the index or ranked extremely low for their optimized keywords.


So what is the Google Sandbox Theory? The Google Sandbox is a filter on the search engine's algorithm that has a dampening influence on websites. It is a common notion in the industry that the Google Sandbox effect decreases after a certain period of time due to website aging. However this is far from true. Actually, the effects reduce over time not on the basis of website aging, but on link aging.

Link Aging implies the time from when you start acquiring quality links for your website. Thus, if nothing is done, your website may not be released from the Google Sandbox. So it is important to follow the strategies mentioned below to minimize the time spent in the Google Sandbox:

- It is beneficial to start the link building process as soon as the website is created and not making the mistake of waiting for the website to be perfect to start this process. The sooner you start the link building process, the sooner your links will age and the sooner you will escape the sandbox.
- Try to establish a long term link building plan with specific targets for each week, day or month. It is important to get themed links rather than hundreds of "junk" links. For example contacting 5-20 link partners per day and setting a target of acquiring 30-40 links per week.
- Finally the most important factor is to avoid the black hat SEO techniques at all cost, because with the constantly evolving Google's search algorithm, penalties for breaking the rules may keep you stuck in the Sandbox longer than usual or get banned.

Is Your Site Search Engine Friendly?

Search Engine optimization (SEO) is a cumulative results of a number of factors which basically can be summarized into two categories: On page optimization and off page optimization factors. One of the key factors pertaining to on page optimization is making sure that your website structure is search engine friendly so that search engines can properly spider and index your site. Two most important things in this regard that is to be remembered as a rule of thumb are:

1) The links in the site true hyperlinks that can be picked up properly by the search engines: Hyperlinks generally tend to serve two purposes: First it helps the search engine to properly spider the site and second helping to increase the page rank of your site. For example if you have 80 sub pages and all of them contains a link back to the home page of your site then in the eyes of Google you receive 80 votes for your website, which facilitates in increasing your overall Page Rank. Often people tend to disregard this fact and use "non-standard" hyperlinks. "Non-standard" hyperlinks are javascrípt generated hyperlinks or hyperlinks embedded within flash files. The simple fact is that javascrípt and flash is NOT search engine friendly and this factor is a major hindrance to SEO. Google is pretty much the only engine that is able to pick up links within javascrípt or flash code; however it is unclear whether Google places any VALUE on the links it finds in this manner. At present either Yahoo or MSN does not have this ability. So, be absolutely sure that your links are true hyperlinks ("true" hyperlinks are hyperlinks coded with the normal "href" tags), if you want to get your site indexed and follow proper SEO techniques.

2) All main pages or 1st tier pages, within the site are reachable within 2-3 clicks from the homepage: Ideally, you want your visitors and the search engines to be able to reach any main page within your site preferably within a maximum of 2-3 clicks. The more clicks it takes to reach a page, the less chance there is that the search engines will index that page. It is for this reason, that site maps have become so popular. By utilizing a sitemap, you are able to link from your homepage to a page that lists all or most of the links to the various pages of your site. The search engines (and visitors) are then able to get to virtually any page of your site within just a couple of clicks. However it is important to remember that site maps are not a total fix for bad navigational structure within a site.

By: Bryan Mitchell

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Debbie Everson, CEO SearchMar, Inc. - leading provider of search engine optimization & marketing solutions, with over 100 customers in software, business services and retail. Call 866-885-6263 or Contact Sales for information about our services.

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