Beware the Google Sandbox

It always pays never to base all your marketing plans on one source. Spread around where your income, or your site visitors come from an if one source of clicks fails, the others will take up the slack.

Enter one of my sites. It's a shopping directory for UK based shops. Links are free and the income from it comes from affiliate links and contextual advertising. It was started last January and by June it had around 200-300 pages. Income was OK from it and visitors were coming mostly from Google.

Then the unthinkable happened.

SANDBOXED

Overnight, my listings all disappeared to the end of the search results pages and traffic from Google ceased.

Lots of people have theories on why this occurs, including gaining links from external sites too fast (and appearing to Google like a link spammer), or that when links from other sites appear they are put on hold in Google's eyes until they have matured. There could be any number of reasons, but it was pretty clear my site had been Google Sandboxed.

I had been sceptical in the past about the very existence of the Google Sandbox, but events about 6 months before this one proved it to me when I watched the entire process of a site doing well, then disappearing into the Sandbox, then 8 months later reappearing at the top of the listings without any changes being made to the site.

Now it's happened to me I'm doubly sure of the Google Sandbox's existence. It may not be a physical place that the sites are sent to, but something in the algorithm triggers sites to drop out of the listings and appear later.

So what can I do to get out of the sandbox? Nothing. Just keep building the site and adding content and eventually when it is released I should make up for all the earnings that are missing just now. In the meantime Yahoo and MSN are both sending some traffic my way and I'm glad of that. If I really needed to make money out of this site I'd have to go down the root of PPC advertising etc as an alternative traffic stream.

So, if you have a new site on a new domain, you should expect it to disappear into the Google sandbox at some point. Don't panic, just keep building the site and making sure it is listed in as many places as possible, other search engines, directories, related sites. Don't mess around with the SEO or go anywhere near an SEO who says he can get you out of the Sandbox - they can't. They'll just be hoping that you come out of the sandbox naturally while you are on their books and it'll make them look like SEO heroes when in actuality you would have come out anyway.

5-Oct-2005