This article is in place to discuss and provoke ideas around Google’s Sandbox Theory; it’s a largely theoretical subject amongst SEO specialists and is quite literally a stumbling block when dealing with New Websites!

Google’s Sandbox Theory?!

The theory surrounds new websites, the idea being that Google is imposing some kind of penalty to new websites or sites acquiring large amounts of links in a relatively short amount of time.

The so-called "sandbox" Theory suggests that new sites may show for obscure search's but not at all for searches completely relevant to the site in question, SEO specialists are then pulling their hair out making change after change and not actually ranking on quite legitimate terms.

The theory also suggests that established websites who obtained many hundreds even thousands of link over a short time are also placed in the Google Sandbox, as they seem to be part of a link trading scheme or to be purchasing links as a means to generating page rank through link farming. This type of process goes against Google’s perception of a "quality" ranking system and so is frowned upon.

SEO Specialists

Many highly respected SEO specialists speculate that once in the "sandbox" a period of 6-8 months have to pass until Google will then crawl sites and re-evaluate their web presence!.

My theory on the Google Sandbox is that there isn’t any "sandbox" at all, in fact, a new algorithm is favouring age over the other 200 rules included in its indexing system, I like to call this an "ageing filter".