Do you know, with blackhat practices like bulk buying of links, creation of duplicate content, and keyword stuffing can get your site to the coveted top of search engine? Or other blackhat practices like creating new sites, which overnight get tons of backlinks, or which are used as a source of backlinks to support an older site — possibly owned by the same company — and make it indexed and admitted to top positions?
The Barrier
Well, needless to say, when such fake sites are indexed and admitted to top positions, this deteriorates search results for sure. It is no surprise that Google choose to penalize this kinda sites and had to take measures for ensuring that such practices will not be tolerated. So here comes this barrier. It’s called a sandbox. The penalized sites stay there until they get mature enough to be allowed to the normal positioning club.
Although there is no direct confirmation of the existence of a sandbox, Google employees have implied it and SEO experts have seen in practice that new sites, no matter how well optimized, don’t rank high on Google, while on MSN and Yahoo they catch quickly. For Google, the jailing in the sandbox for new sites with new domains is on average 6 months, although it can vary from less than a month to over 8 months.
Probation Period
The sandbox effect works like a probation period for new sites and by making the practice of farming fake sites a long-term, rather than a short-term payoff for site owners, it is supposed to decrease its use.
Sandbox and aging delay are similar in meaning and many SEO experts use them interchangeably. Aging delay is more self-explanatory – sites are “delayed” till they come of age. Well, unlike in legislation, with search engines this age is not defined and it differs. There are cases when several sites were launched in the same day, were indexed within a week from each other but the aging delay for each of them expired in different months.
As you see, the sandbox is something beyond your control and you cannot avoid it but still there are steps you can undertake to minimize the damage for new sites with new domains. I ‘m gonna discuss it in the next subject, 6 Ways to Minimize the Sandbox Effect.