RE: FN-FORUM: Google won't index PHP site

date posted 24th January 2006 13:44

On 24 Jan 2006 10:31:29 -0000, "Ben Butterfield" said:
>
> >>No, but they were crawled within days of going live, and I was lead to
> >>believe sandbox period was no longer than 3 months..
>
> AFAIK, there is no limit on how long a new site will stay in the sandbox.
> If
> you heard that from Google, then it is probably true, but most other
> sources
> of information on SEO need to be taken with a pinch of salt as we are all
> guessing how their systems work.

The sandbox is (allegedly) a combination of several filters Google has
in place, which artificially penalises new sites - this has been said by
Matt Cutts and another Google staffer, although you can't always believe
was someone says, even if they do work for a company with the motto
"don't be evil." There are lots of filters and some can be triggered by
other factors, so you can get yourself penalised a bit even after your
site has been live for a while - this seemed to happen to one of my
hobby sites a year or so ago and was lifted during the 'Jagger' update
last autumn.

At the moment the sandbox seems to be 9-12 months, but it only affects
competitive keywords, so for instance you can rank well for something
obscure like your own name very quickly, but not for what your business
does (especially if you're an estate agent in London.) Unfortunately
there's not a reliable way to find out what those terms are, and they
are most likely only decided on by the algorithms within Google rather
than by people, so even Google staff would only find out after major
indexing is done.

The sandbox doesn't effect everything, I put up a new site a few weeks
ago and it's all ready ranking well for some terms that are getting me
traffic. However, I wouldn't say they were traditionally 'competitive'
phrases as the site is for a very niche area. Still, if I have found a
way of not getting catch by the sandbox, I'll be happy to reveal it to
anyone with the right amount of cash ;-)

Cheers

Paul
--
Paul Silver - Web Development and Technical Search Engine Optimisation
07813 654285 -- http://www.paulsilver.co.uk
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