March 25th, 2010 by Nick

One of the longest running debates in the search engine optimization community is over the existence or non-existence of a thing called the ‘Sandbox’. The idea is that Google might prevent new sites from ranking for a while by placing them in this sandbox. Similar to putting kids in a playpen until they grow up and bit and show they’re mature enough to move into the wider playground without causing trouble or giving the other kids a nasty cold.

Google have been silent on the subject of this sandbox, and its existence is only speculative. Some SEO practitioners maintain that no new site will rank properly until after a set time has passed because of it. The length of that time is the subject of hot debate amongst sandbox believers too, as are the exact effects of being placed in the sandbox in the first place. Most agree that the sandbox sentence lasts for six to nine months, but beyond that it’s all open for debate.

And there has also been yet more controversy. It’s been said by sceptics that the sandbox concept was invented by SEO companies to explain why their techniques don’t always work. As you can imagine, those are fighting words and the sandbox believers reacted strongly.

So, let’s weigh in. Most of the strong search engine optimisation researchers believe there is no sandbox. It may not necessarily be that ineffective SEO companies are lying about it to cover up their faults, just that they don’t understand why their approach hasn’t worked for a particular new site and are casting about for an explanation. No malice is necessarily implied.

We believe that effective search engine optimisation is a long term process and at best an ongoing one. It’s natural that new sites don’t rank well. All sites have zero authority to begin with, and it’s not til they start get some link building strategies in place that Google’s spiders will even index the site with any frequency.  Even if you start with great content from day one, a new site isn’t intermeshed with the rest of the web. Like the new kid in the playground, it takes a while to make friends and earn some trust.

Using unethical link building strategies to boost a new website’s rankings won’t work, and to those who don’t understand why not, the existence of a sandbox might look plausible. If you buy a few thousand links from a black hat SEO company and don’t realise that what you’re buying is a pile of spam, you’ll look for another explanation when they don’t help your rankings improve. Most of the people who try these shady techniques own new sites, of course.

Even if you take the white hat SEO route, it may take a while before your social media marketing and inbound link building strategies start to take off and your brand new site starts to get attention from search engines. We don’t promise results in anything less than a month for that reason.

Link to us

If you want to link to this blog, copy and paste the following HTML code to your website.