What's Google Sandbox? And how long does it takes to come out?

It's no secret that Google is the biggest search engine out there and you'll probably get the majority of traffics from google. You might get more from Yahoo or Bing in rare occasion if they favor your site. Anyways, either you want to know what's sandbox about or wondering why you still haven't get any traffics from google, it's because of the sandbox.

Sandbox effect is a word internet webmaster use to referred to the penalty Google search engine placed on new domains. This is to prevent search engine optimizers (SEO) from manipulating the search engine ranking by creating hundreds or thousands of incoming links in short period of time. Every new domains will be placed in the sandbox for 3-12 months depends on the competiveness of the market. Although there's a lot debating over whether the sandbox effect exist or not in webmaster community, there's indeed some sort of filtering and observation period for every new sites. Sandbox basically is just a part of google search engine architectual to determine a site ranking. So either you agree or not, sandbox or whatever you want to call it does exist to prevent spamming or low quality site. As for how long, it's hard to determine. I've created 3 new sites 3 months back with unique content updated daily. Although it's getting little traffic from google, the index rate is extremely slow. Even if my new content pages were indexed, it doesn't rank well at all for the very long exact keywords. In comparison, another site which I built long time ago, new pages were indexed in almost hours and rank well instantly even though the content is duplicated. You see the difference just because the age of the site? I still can't tell you exactly how long, but i'll let you know when the new site I created is out of sandbox.

Another issues webmaster like to debate over with is the competitiveness of target keywords. Yes, it's true that if the keyword you target doesn't have any or very little competition such as your domain name, you can rank on the first result immediately after google indexed your site. Unless there's any searches for the keyword, it's pointless anyway. Remember the most important parts of getting high traffic is through all your content/inner pages, all these little traffic adds up. If you are in google sandbox, you can't rank well for all these pages. That's the reason why I think the sandbox does exist. But that doesn't mean that targetting one top searches keyword is bad, it's not advisable if you don't want what you are doing. Try concentrating more on your inner pages and create unique articles everyday.

What you can do while you are in sandbox is to build more incoming links to your site, adding more contents. Another things I'd like to mention is that the effect of the link doesn't take effect immediately. You can say there's some kind of link sandbox too, you'll only see result after 3 months, the longer the better. So it's wise to start building in early age. But do not over build incoming link, let it flows naturally. Otherwise, google might put your site in sandbox for a longer period of time. Quality is over quantity. Look for high quality links instead of low quality links. Google have the top phycologist working for them, they know what you'll do to try manipulating the ranking. But they are pre scripted bots afterall, work smartly and you'll beat the sandbox effect.