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How to get out of Google's sandbox
If your web site has good rankings on Yahoo, MSN and other
search engines but not on Google, it's likely that your web
site has been put into Google's sandbox.
What is Google's sandbox?
In general, brand-new web sites with new domain names need
about 6 - 8 months to get top rankings on Google.
The usual process is that Google indexes the new web site,
lists it for some less important queries and then the web
pages drop from the search engine result pages for several
months. Although other search engines work fine, Google
doesn't list the web site, sometimes not even for the company
name.
If you have a brand-new web site, don't worry about this
behavior. You are not doing anything wrong. Google seems
to delay the inclusion of new web sites. This phenomenon
is called the Google sandbox.
Why does Google delay the inclusion of brand-new
web sites?
It seems that Google delays the inclusion of brand-new
web sites to encourage webmasters to build content instead
of building mini-networks.
Many webmasters try to artificially inflate the link popularity
of their web site by creating a network of small web sites
with different URLs that all link to each other. Many of
these web sites have no purpose other than linking to the
main web site.
By delaying the ranking of new web sites, this mini-network
strategy doesn't offer a quick jump to the top anymore.
The delay might encourage webmasters to focus on the content
of their main web site instead of building useless mini
sites.
What can you do to get out of the sandbox?
If you have a new web site, expect that your web site will
be listed within 6-8 months in Google. Add content to your
web site, get
good incoming links and make sure that your web pages
are optimized
for Google.
As soon as you have a domain name, create a temporary page
and link to it from another web site to make Google aware
of your web site. The 6-8 months delay seem to start with
Google's first contact with your web site. The sooner Google
knows about your web site, the sooner it will be listed.
By the way, Yahoo and MSN don't have such a delay so don't
focus on Google alone but also optimize your web pages for
these search engines.
Can you speed up the whole process?
It seems that there's nothing that can be done to speed
up the sandbox process. Some webmasters in online forums
suggested that it might help to get inbound links that point
to different web pages of your web site, not just to your
index page.
It might also help if your web site has its own IP address
and it also seems to help if you have a link from the Yahoo
directory. However, these theories haven't been confirmed
yet.
Google's sandbox is Google's attempt to prevent spammers
from creating web sites that are just a flash
in the pan. Google wants to return high quality web sites
with good content in its result pages.
If you haven't done it yet, take a look at last week's article
which discusses Google's focus on latent semantic indexing
in its latest search engine algorithm.
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