So you put a lot of work into building a really great website and find that no one can find it and Google doesn’t rank your site very high. You hear about something called “search engine optimization” and decide to give it a try. Before you add your keywords to every element of your pages and build links in any way you can, take a step back and remember the old saying, “sometimes less is more.”
Search engine optimization, or SEO, has really taken off in the last five years as more and more novice webmasters have built websites, only to find that no one is coming to visit them. As they look for ways to get more visitors, most of them quickly find resources on how to optimize a web page for search engines and get to work spraying keywords everywhere and building links from anywhere they can get them. .
This causes problems for a search engine because, let’s face it, you are trying to manipulate the search results and they are trying to prevent them from being manipulated. After all, just because YOU think your site is a great resource on a topic doesn’t mean it is. Google has already adjusted for the webmaster who is over-optimizing their website, and it’s called a “sandbox” by Google. Sandboxing is a name disgruntled webmasters have given to the situation where a new site that should rank well for a keyword is nowhere to be found in the rankings, only to suddenly appear one day several months later. What is this sandbox effect and what could cause it?
My theory is that the “sandbox” is actually more of a “trustbox”, which means that Google looks at many attributes of your site to determine if you are trying to manipulate search rankings. I think the most obvious trap, and the double trap most beginning webmasters fall into, is to over-optimize the content on the page and create too many low-quality links too quickly.
I think the newer your domain is, the less tolerance Google has for over-optimizing pages or suspiciously fast link building. Once you activate the filter, you are placed in the holding cell (“sandbox”), because Google suspects that you are trying to manipulate the results. I also believe that tolerance for over-optimization varies by industry, so spam industries such as pharmaceuticals are much more sensitive to over-optimization than most. That can put off many hoping to find success fast, as those industries are already competitive enough to NEED highly optimized content and lots of links to possibly compete for top rankings, but you can’t do it too fast or you’ll be sandboxed. .
At a recent WebmasterWorld conference, Google’s Matt Cutts stated that there wasn’t really a “sandbox”, but “the algorithm could affect some sites, in some circumstances, in a way that a webmaster would perceive as a sandbox.” This means that avoiding the sandbox is simply a matter of optimizing your site without turning on filters in Google’s algorithm.
Ask yourself these questions to avoid over-optimization penalties:
– Is your title a single target keyword phrase and nothing else?
– Is your keyword phrase found in several of the following locations?
title, heading, subheadings, words in bold or italics?
– Does the page read differently than you would normally speak?
– Are you in a competitive industry that is frequented by spammers?
– Have you quickly acquired a large number of low PageRank links?
– Do you have very few high PageRank (6+) links pointing to your site?
In short, the current theory about Google’s “sandbox” is that it’s actually more like a holding cell where Google’s “police” hold your website when suspected of possibly trying to manipulate search results. As the domain ages, most sites eventually gain enough “trust” to escape the sandbox and immediately start ranking where they normally would. Remember that Google does not manually rank all websites; In the end, it’s simply a computer algorithm and those who can score well on Google’s algorithm WITHOUT activating any filters will get the best rankings and make the most profit.