The Sandbox Effect - Truth or Lies?

[incka]

If you don't know what the sandbox effect is, this is a brief explanation:

Your site gets a good initial ranking by google, then you fall far into the SERPS and between 2-4 months you rise to a good position based on your site.

I would personally be very doubtful about this, yet someone exactly like that happend to my MSN Emotions site. So what are your opinions? Is it truth or lies?

[chrispian]

Sound sort of odd to me. Your initial ranking is always a guess and should not have any indication of your actual site's rank. After 2-4 months Google will be able to rank your site and reflect your true ranking. It sounds like someone has just given a name to the natural evolution of your ranking in the SERPS.

[paul]

I have three sites where I have made major changes in the last month and have watched them rise :) and then fall :( One site moved from #16 to #10 and back down again. These are sites with few links, for VERY niche terms. However, even my oldest PR6 site moved from #7 to #5 and now is back down to #6. Others haven't changed at all.

I am left feeling the rankings are much more dynamic than I realized.

In the offline world, established players/companies are difficult for newcomers to dislodge. If Google is as dynamic as it seems, this would imply that newcomers online would might have an easier time getting good rankings.

[Chris]

I have had no problems getting brand new sites well ranked, consistently, and continuously.

[Mike]

But could that be because of all the PR you have to start with, from Jalic?

[r2d2]

My casino site was good for a coupla weeks, then disappeared, now is starting to come back after about 5 months.

In my experience, I would say there is some truth to it.

Apparently it is to cut down on spammers, due to them having to wait several months to get anywhere, should stop them, but decent webmasters should stick it out.

[incka]

Decent webmasters don't like waiting.

[Chris]

The whole "Sandbox Theory" though is directly concerned with such links. So I, of all people, should be affected.

[MarkB]

Chris, are there any secret methods of success you're not telling us?;)

[Kyle]

Yes, I'll speak for him.
267 dmoz listings for online-literature.com... that's his secret.

[incka]

I'll do same as Icebane - His orienteering, survival, fitness & aritst biography sites get most of their PR from dmoz too. There is some debate as whether DMOZ links count more than other links of the same PR...

[AndyH]

I highly doubt DMOZ links count more than other links. I would think that every single link anywhere on the internet counts the same as it just makes logical sense.

[r2d2]

Decent webmasters don't like waiting.

By 'decent' I meant 'honest' rather than how good they are.

Incka, DMOZ links dont could any more in terms of PR than other links of identical PR. Even Chris states this somewhere in this sites tutorials I believe, you will get lots of other links from DMOZ copies though.

267 listings on DMOZ x 30 copies = ~8000 links.

(Not sure about how many copies there are, just I have roughly 30 backlinks from DMOZ copies.)

[nohaber]

Links from DMOZ clones shouldn't count at Google, IMO. Yahoo is a different story.

[incka]

I love DMOZ. I just thought I should say that... Is it by the same people as FireFox?

[Chris]

I'll do same as Icebane - His orienteering, survival, fitness & aritst biography sites get most of their PR from dmoz too. There is some debate as whether DMOZ links count more than other links of the same PR...

Not a single correct statement in that post.

DMOZ links are no big deal. My survival site had a PR of 7 before it got a single listing in DMOZ too. My fitness site has 0 listings. My orienteering site only has 2. As for my literature site, sure 267 links do help, but so do the couple dozen yahoo links, and the thousands of links from blogs and teacher pages.

My only secrets are I have alot of sites, and I'm years ahead of most of you. Although some of you put too much ads on your sites too early in their growth.

[incka]

Well I was wrong... It looked like they did...

Who puts too many ads on too early? All my sites that have ads on have all the page views you say they should have before having ads on...

[Blue Cat Buxton]

Forgive my ignorance, but will ads effect the search engine rankings then. Or is the effect indirect because other sites dont link to for profit sites as readily?

[incka]

We always go off topic on this forum. It is what makes it so great...

[Chris]

Putting too many ads, especially obnoxious ones, on a site hinders the early accumulation of incoming links and return visitors.

[MarkB]

Chris, can I assume from your statement that due to having a number of sites with decent PR, your simply link to your new sites via them, therefore putting a nice amount of 'weight' behind a new site at launch?

[r2d2]

Who puts too many ads on too early?

Im guilty of that, just couldnt ever see getting x0,000 page views a month ever, so just put Adsense on house site right from the start.

Might take them off for a while though and build some links, now I am over the childish excitement of earning my first dollars :D

[MarkB]

LOL, I'm guilty of that as well, Mr T.

[incka]

Um, wait a second, I did that too with my Debt site... But at $50CPM on the sky who can blame me...

[Kyle]

I dislike DMOZ. Yes it's free, and open, and moderated by the people for the people... but they're too powerful. My issue is how powerful DMOZ is and have a horrible management system. You gotta love their system when you want to check the status of your page submission.

1) 6 weeks after you submit your page, you inquire on their forum.
2) They tell you the status, then you can't inquire again for 6 months.

That's horrible. Also they are extremely unclear when denying applications to become an editor. I wanted to become an editor of the Poison Ivy section, given that I have experience and my own pages. They denied me after about 8 weeks and gave a list of possible reasons why I was denied.

Again, if they weren't so powerful... their horrible system wouldn't matter. Just to counter certain people's responses before they post them - I am very grateful for what they've done for my sites. People love them because they have all the pagerank! They are mirrored all over the web which results in many targetted links.

[pas]

Agreed. DMOZ is horribly run.

[Jaffro]

yea dmoz is a pain.

Comment on sandbox - i agree its something thats always been there but someone gave it a name, and its dependent on the site. I think it only really effects brand new sites with no links due to the initial ranking that google does. PR is based apon iteration taking into account the www interlinking, if you have a site with no incoming links it will take a while to get a higher pr. (after the initial non pr ranking - google after all will need time to do the first iteration).
However in cases like Chris (i assume the following) he starts a site with good incoming links instead of no incoming links and therefore when google begins to use the new sites first pr calculations they're already showing better that sites with no links, giving a more stable initial se rank.

maybe :)

[Chris]

Exactly. I give new sites a boost with links on Jalic.com.

Jaffro what you describe is the opposite of sandbox.

The idea is that new links, not new sites, are put on probation for a few months before they start helping. Considering I get instant gratification from my links I don't believe it.

[AndyH]

A search engine on the scale of Google wouldn't be able to log when links were added - just for that extra bit of information, with 4 Billion+ pages in its index, would take up way too much space.

[Jaffro]

yea its mad to think they'd hold out on incoming links just because they're new, just not worth it. bah to it!

As always it comes down to incoming links, if you got them and they're good you'll not experience the '3rd week drop' (in new sites i'm talking). I suppose the 3ish weeks is just the initial ranking period, or the period it takes to start reliable pr on a new site.

I didn't realise that anyone was debating that new links had the effect - where's my head been?!

[intelliot]

A search engine on the scale of Google wouldn't be able to log when links were added - just for that extra bit of information, with 4 Billion+ pages in its index, would take up way too much space.
Google has enough space, don't worry about that :)

They already cache nearly every page in the index. It's rather trivial to add a timestamp to that, if they don't already :)