The Google Sandbox and what it can mean for your site and your ranking

So what is this Google Sandbox we keep hearing about?

It's the period of time between when your site is first presented to Google and Google's becoming satisfied as to its provenance.

Dumb, huh? I mean, doesn't Google have an algorithm for that sort of thing?

Well, they do, but Google have been fooled so many times it seems they now distrust every new site unless it comes with a certificate of provenance.

So the sandbox effect is primarily a probationary period, of no fixed or pre-determined duration, during which a site is held back in the ranks until Google is satisfied about that provenance.

I will stress that word. Provenance. If you find what looks like an old Vermeer in the attic and you take it along to the local museum and ask them to prominently display it and they ask, on what basis, and you say, it's an old Vermeer, and they say, well, who says so, and you say, well, I do, it looks like an old Vermeer to me, and they say, well, who are you, expert, maybe? and you say no, I'm just me, and they say, well then, but they have another look at it and it doesn't look too bad so they say, tell you what we'll do, we'll display it in one of the quieter rooms at the back, so you say, ok. Then you go tell your mates from the pub about this old Vermeer you found and they troop along with you to see it hanging in the museum and, to a man, they are in agreement that this is indeed an old Vermeer so you pass this on to the museum owners and they say, grudgingly, well, ok then, as your mates say it's a Vermeer too then we'll put it in one of the better rooms with more light - but we're still not accepting that this is actually a genuine Vermeer, mind, but it seems to be an interesting exhibit of some kind. So, then you get on the phone and you have the world's most universally accepted expert on Vermeer come to have a look and he hems and he haws for a while and then to everyone's delight he declares that the work is, indeed, a previously lost work of the old Dutch Master and the museum owners promptly move the painting to the finest room in the house and, most importantly of all from our allegorical perspective, they Prominently Display It!!!

All of which is similar to what happens when you take a new site along to Google. It may get a few votes of confidence from the equivalent of links from your mates down the pub, but that doesn't impress Google very much, and nor should it. But when you get verification in the form of links from accepted authorities, Google will promptly elevate your site to a prominent position. If it's a good site, when people search using Google, they want people to easily find it. Once you get the idea that a) your site does indeed have to be the genuine article and b) you have to have clear verification of that, which will usually involve getting links back from accepted authority sites, then establishing provenance and through that getting out of the Google Sandbox should be a breeze.

To sum up, then, if Google can satisfy itself about the high quality of your site the same day it goes live, then for you there won't be evidence of any such thing as a sandbox. More commonly, though, establishing this provenance will take a bit of time, and it's during that time that the dreaded Google Sandbox will appear to be taking effect.

Then, there's the living up to the public's expectations aspect. Did you notice that BMW, when they recently got their wrist slapped by Google for overt spamming, were gone from the index for a majestic three days? Three Days? what kind of punishment is that, you might ask? A pragmatic one, would be the answer. From Google's point of view, someone with the established high profile that BMW already have simply has to be found, and easily found, in Google's index. People would naturally expect to find it there and, if they don't, Google run the very real risk of them going off to the other engines to find it and never coming back. While they're there, they may well find features they didn't know about that they discover they like and so elect to stay there. So, if you're prominent in your field and Google know this, you a) won't get any kind of meaningful punishment for spamming, no matter how overt (partly because, let's face it, you wouldn't need to be spamming anyway), and b) there won't be any such thing as a sandbox for you, either. So, if you want another way to beat the sandbox, get a high profile in world-wide offline media: advertise!

Google, we must remember, is in the business of serving up sites in response to searches that have the searchers walking away feeling they've had a good search experience. To that end a site must not only have the appearance of being a good site, it must also have at least some of the actualities. Google has been fooled too many times by sites that looked like a duck, quacked like a duck, consequently got ranked like a duck, but turned out not to be an actual duck at all, rather something some spammer had got up to fool Google's algos into perceiving it as a duck. So, what Google does these days is to wait until independent third parties give their opinion, which they measure by the number and origin of inbound links to the site. This means that if your site ostensibly about ducks only has links from sites of the "Del-Boy's Honest Duck Club" or "Da Legitimate Businessmen's Club for Discriminatin' Ducks" variety then even after the traditional nine months to a year have passed, your site will still be in the Sandbox. But if, even in a few weeks or days, your carefully crafted site about ducks has gained links from established authority sites on the subject then there'll be precious little time in the Google Sandbox for you.

Why is this necessary at all? Google's algorithms are in many ways hopeless. Despite their legions of PHDs the algos still can't tell an imitation from the genuine article, so in a roundabout way Google still has to rely on human judgment to determine the rankings. I think it's always been like this, it's just all this talk about the variations in the algos has tended to obscure it.

Going off the subject and looking back a bit, I think it probably all began as a compensatory device to ameliorate the - shall we say unfortunate - effects of Google's then algorithm. A study of link popularity indicates that Google's algo determined that people who were already high in the more competitive serps and already had a goodly number of back links at the time of the Florida update are the same people who will remain in that fortunate position until such time as either a) Hell freezes over or b) Google openly admits the failings of the algorithm and changes it accordingly.

What seems to happen with the Sandbox Effect is that a newly indexed site will appear comfortingly high in the rankings in Google for its search terms. It'll sit there for a brief period and then for no apparent reason plummet to a much lower rank. It'll climb up some places, but usually not too many.

I suspect myself this is, at least in part, because Google themselves are well (if belatedly) aware of their algo's shortcomings and that this is an attempt to counteract them.

It gives an artificial prominence to a new site to give it a chance to get noticed and gather inbound links. After being given an appropriate time, it is allowed to fall back to its "natural" position. There, or around there, it will usually stay for some time.

All of this goes against the popular assumption that Google is master of all it surveys and can do no wrong. True, it gives search results that seem to satisfy. A search in Google will quickly return a string of informative results with ease. People walk away with the feeling they've had their money's worth. So to speak. In terms of the good search experience, Google undoubtedly is King. But since the Florida & Jagger debacles, when it clearly got things demonstrably wrong, it's also been regarded by some as the Pretender to its own throne.

And since the BigDaddy infrastructure upgrade, it's worse. Much, much worse. I'm hearing lately that Sergey and Brin have been unloading, big-time, on the stock market. Hey, if I worked for Google, I'd at least be considering selling my stock too... Frankensearch Lives!!!