|
« Lycos DDoS denied |
Main
| Handwritten search »
December 05, 2004
Google Sandbox: revisited
My recent foray into speculation on the Google Sandbox seems to have raised a few eyebrows.
For those who don't know what I'm talking about, the Google Sandbox appears to be some kind of "filter" applied by Google to slow, delay, and frustrate the manipulation of rankings by use of artifical link building, amongst other things.
The Google Sandbox can become a chronic problem for newer sites, which may have difficulty becoming ranked for keywords they are linked to for up to 3-4 months.
For many sites, this is not an issue - but in a commercial environment is can be a very serious problem. The inability to rank on Google for any kind of commercially useful search terms can effectively render a new commerce website invisible to internet traffic - and prevent profitable operation, unless signed up for additional advertising, such as through Google's Adsense (how handy :) ).
There's a lot of debate about how the Google Sandbox may actually be applied - for example, is it to links? What about sites?
It can be difficult to test this properly, because commercial level link building involves getting links from a variety of sources. So how can you tell which links are and are not working best?
Recently I built a series of websites and placed links on them - and despite the pages having been indexed and cached, the anchor text (keywords in the links) have not impacted Google's rankings - certainly not at the time of writing.
Yet if someone joins the free Digital Point Co-op Advertising Network, they can impact Google's rankings fairly quickly. I've tested this for myself, and it will certainly cause fairly immediate movement for search terms that are not too competitive.
Question is: what does the Co-op Network offer that custom link building cannot? What quality is it that makes Google regard some of the links in the co-op network as having "authority" enough to impact SERPs sooner, rather than later?
My suggestion in Google Sandboxed: solved? was that PageRank could be the determining factor in it all - not so much that a couple of higher PR pages was enough - but if you could get links from a wider number of higher PageRank pages, then Google would be forced into accepting the linkage as "authorative".
Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Rountable disagreed, suggesting that it was entirely the age of the target page that was the determining factor. A couple of people at the Threadwatch thread on the issue suggested it could be due to other factors.
Ultimately, other variables could be involved: automated WHOIS queries of how long domains have been active - or simply Google self-referencing it's own index - could see Google awarding greater authority to sites and/or pages simply on the basis of age of site, or even just the age of the links from the pages of such sites.
What complicates it more is that more established sites will tend towards having higher PageRank - so the role of PageRank in this could be incidental.
Either way, the Google Sandbox remains both an intriguing and frustrating process - and the ultimate secret of whether Google has a main engine, for designating "authority" to impact rankings out of the sandbox, remains locked from public view.
Of all the comments I've seen on the issue, longcal911 of the DigitalPoint Forums made one of the shortest sanest statements on the matter I've read:
If I were GG, I would trust no one. I�fd assume that every new site was out to deceive me. So, I�fd sandbox every new site until I knew more about it. If I started to see links from other sites, and saw regularly added content, and if I saw general stability, I�fd let it out of the box and watch it closely.
Over time, if all seemed normal, I would trust it more. As the site matured, and once it gained my full trust, I would take clear notice of the sites (pages) it links to.
If another new site came along, and if the first (fully trusted) site linked to it, this would boost my trust in the new site. In other words, the new site would *inherit* my trust. I would therefore crawl this new site more often, and I would analyze its pages faster, and I would remove some of the �erank inhibitors�f I had placed on it, allowing it to rise to its natural position in listings.
I think that if Google trusts a site, it can do a lot of things (like SEO) and not be penalized. I have a close friend who I trust completely. I might say to him, �gI�fm going away for the weekend. Here are the keys to my house�h. And because I trust him, I trust his friends.
His friends inherit my trust. This is the exact behavior I see in Google, although I�fm still waiting for keys to the house. :-)
So what is behind the Sandbox? One main factor dancing all other variables? Or a gentle mix of a handful of different factors? Hopefully this thread at WebmasterWorld will help begin to deliver empirical results.
Posted by at December 5, 2004 10:37 PM
> Discuss this in the Platinax Business forums
|
