For any of you familiar with Google and their page ranking system, you should be familiar with the sandbox. The sandbox is that mysterious holding place where sites seem to go when they first start up, when they do something bad (like copy content), or various other untrustworthy things.
I found a guide to help you beat the sandbox which I encourage you to read. It is a great reference and really spells out why some sites that should rank, don’t. It also clues you in on what Google wants to see in your site and how to achieve those things.
What is the Google Sandbox? Does it really exist? I almost didn’t include this little section, because the “Does the sandbox exist?” debate has become as annoying as the “white hat vs. black hat” one. But just to be absolutely clear, the sandbox does exist. No, it’s not just a straight aging delay, as originally thought; and no, you don’t have to call it “the sandbox” if you don’t want to. (In fact, I kind of prefer the term “Trustbox”.) But speaking as an organic-only guy who has launched a site every other week for the past two years (really), I can tell you that “this sandbox/Trustbox thingy” appears again and again independent of niche, type of site, number of pages, etc. As for what it is: The sandbox/Trustbox is a set of filters in Google’s search algorithm that together prevent new sites from ranking well until they gain trust.
The article can be found at linkbuildingblog.com. Let me know what you think! Are you in the sandbox?
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