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Google Sandbox - new sites taking ages to get hits!

A great deal has been written about the Google "Sandbox" theory - a much discussed topic on the excellent SEOChat forums.

The theory is that Google indexes new sites within days, but does not assign new sites with ranking points until many months after they've gone live. This, presumably, is to deter spammers and others from gaining quick and easy search engine referrals.

We have a good reason to believe there is a "sandbox". Bytestart first went live last July. We received maybe 10 or so referrals a day from Google.com and Google.co.uk for many months. However, after 8 months, these numbers suddenly rocketed to around 400+ per day. Touch wood, this number has stayed and grown for the last month... We've heard similar things from many other small business site owners, so there must be an element of truth in it.

So, if any small business owners are wondering why Google hasn't been particularly kind to them in the early days, the "sandbox" could well be the cause.

Possibly the best way to tackle the waiting period would be either to set up a skeleton site well in advance of your "launch" date and spend the time establishing good quality reciprocal links with sites of a similar theme.

We have several other articles on this phenomenon on the main site:

Posted March 24, 2006

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