SEO Solutions to the Sandbox Effect

Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Do you think your website is in the Google sandbox? By definition, the sandbox effect is a theory that newly-registered domains or domains with frequent ownership or name server changes are placed in a sandbox in the indexes of Google until it is deemed appropriate for the ranking to starts.

There are still different opinions about the sandbox effect. While some think that the sandbox effect does not exist, others think of it as a result of a mathematical algorithm and not a policy decision from Google. Some feel that the sandbox does not affect results from other search engines like Yahoo or MSN. Anyway it seems that sandboxing is an inevitable process, and every new domain has to go through it in the beginning. It is observed that it can take up to one year or more for a domain to get out of the sandbox even with good SEO techniques.

What are the factors that determine how long a website will stay in the sandbox? They include the following main factors,
  • Domain age - Google considers older sites to be more authoritative
  • Links- The total number of incoming links that a website gets is crucial aspect of search engine optimization. More links means a more important site, but care must be taken that one does not relate to link farms as this is considered spammy.
  • Content volume- A regular and good quality of content is the best
  • Duplicate content- The lesser the duplicate content the better for the website.
To get out of the sandbox the best thing to do is to register the website as early as possible and only good original content should be updated on a regular basis. Care should be taken to avoid duplication of content as much as possible. Another SEO technique is to slowly build up the website's incoming links as this will help to increase the website's page rank. But it should be done on a consistent and timely basis. Getting paid back links from cheap link farms can be quite dangerous and can get a website to be blacklisted.

Outsource Strategies International (OSI) is a US based BPO company that offers services in organic search engine optimization, search engine marketing, Internet marketing consultation and website analytics.

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posted by Outsource Strategies International @ 9:50 PM