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I think that these filters applied by Google are lifted in 30 day increments. So if you do something to trip a filter, it gets removed after some period of time has passed. I’ve noticed on many sites that this clocks in at exactly the three month mark, or 90 days. My prediction is that by the end of November, this site will have a sudden jump in traffic as the Sandbox, or part of it, gets lifted. It was founded in late July – meaning 90 days after that is late October. But I’m also factoring in the time it took for Google to find the site and the fact that in my experience, it can take a few weeks for Google to reflect the freshest information. Maybe I’ll be wrong – but if it happens, for me it’s pretty good evidence of the Sandbox. 

It’s the end of November, so was I right? I think so – generally the site had been getting about 30 Google searches per day, give or take 10 or so. But since Sunday, November 26th, it’s been averaging around 100. Lots of things can cause traffic jumps – but the better indicator is what I also posted about previously, the search phrases that where unique to this site and yet completely unranked. In my last post I pointed to this search, where this site couldn’t be found in the top 200 results – even though it was the only web site on the Internet to use that phrase. As of today, the search showed Free the Drones ranking #1 for that term – exactly where it makes sense for it to be. I also posted this guess from my past experience about what words actually trigger the sandbox, because it is clear that it does not apply to every search phrase:

My guess is that it’s the word “forums” that triggered the filter – something about it is considered competitive or commercial, and the site wasn’t allowed to rank for it because it was new and “untrusted.”

I’m even more sure of it now, because starting on Sunday, the forum part of this site started getting searches for various phrases such as “financial forums” – that it had never gotten before since the site was started.

What does all this mean for people who run websites for their businesses? It means you need to start your website about 4 months in advance from when you want to people to be using it, for one. If you want your site to get searches right of the bat, you’re better off putting something up on an older site – starting a new one will have that 4 month delay. I also think a lot of people have an incorrect view about what they need to do to get their blog or site ranked in Google. I’ve seen a lot of people complaining that it took them six months to a year to get out of the “Sandbox” – and I think if you’re still not ranked at that point and think you’re going to just wait it out, you are wasting your time. Something else is at work – there are a lot of other penalties that can apply to your site regardless of its age, and you might have to make more fundamental changes to the site if you still have ranking problems after the “90 day probation + crawl/update time” period. If you don’t see the same jump I did four months or so after starting your site – I think Google is lowering your rank for reasons other than the Sandbox. Getting better links, fixing duplicate content, and getting rid of any violations of the Webmaster Guidelines are what you should focus on.

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And I’d think about reading blogs as a way to find an agent. It’s kind of strange to have it replace word-of-mouth or recommendations from friends, but you can get a pretty good idea of how knowledgeable someone is about their work by reading what they write about it. It’s hard to figure out whether they’re a crook or some of the other potential pitfalls, but those are a lot easier to figure out in other ways than whether someone knows their job. All it took me was a quick Google search for Austin real estate blog to find this one.

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The Sandbox is a muddled concept used to describe the phenomenon where a new web site seems to perform poorly in Google’s rankings for some period of time. Older web sites do not seem to be affected by it. The reason it’s muddled is that a lot of people have proposed a lot of theories for what’s going on, ranging from a flat time limit (your site must be x months old to be ranked well) to a “trust” theory that you have to be linked from important web sites if your site is new. The closest anyone from Google has come to describing / admitting it is here from Matt Cutts, a Google engineer:

Q: Does the sandbox exist?
A: Matt said here comes the audience part? How many feel there is a sandbox? How many feel there is no such thing as a sandbox? SEOs normally split down the line. There are some things in the algorithm that may be perceived as a sandbox that doesn’t apply to all industries. He knows it works to keep some spam out.

He’s also made other statements along the lines that the Sandbox is something that was unplanned – people started reporting it to Google after an algorithm change, and they liked what they saw, so they kept tinkering with how the search engine results are computed to encourage it. This leads to the more current view of the Sandbox: that there are a set of unrelated “filters” applied to websites based on various factors, which can negatively affect the way that they rank. Age may well be one of these, as well as the kind of links the site receives and the places the site links to.

I’m fairly convinced that new sites suffer from a penalty. In fact, I believe this site is sandboxed right now – even though it’s getting about 1,000 visitors a month from Google. How could that possibly be?

Part of it is my experience with other sites. The other part is the key phrase from Matt Cutts – that it doesn’t apply to all industries. Here’s an example: I promoted another site, targeting three search terms with the same method. It doesn’t work anymore with Google, but it did at the time. The site was brand new. On two of the terms, it ranked virtually immediately. One was a wholly noncommercial phrase, the other was “widget discussion.” I was in the top three for both. The other phrase? “Widget forums.” For that one, I wasn’t in the top 1,000 search results – despite the fact that the site was promoted in the exact same way for all three terms, and got many visitors from the other two. My guess is that it’s the word “forums” that triggered the filter – something about it is considered competitive or commercial, and the site wasn’t allowed to rank for it because it was new and “untrusted.”

Well, why do I think Free the Drones is sandboxed? Because I see the same phenomenon. I’ve been randomly searching for the titles of my posts in Google – the exact wording. For some of them, I’m the first result. Makes sense – the title is distinctive and no one else on the Internet has written those exact words. For example, this search from an old post on saving money by spending a little time on the phone. Type in the exact wording of the post title, and the post comes up at #3. Makes sense – the first two sites don’t have the exact words, but they’re close. And they have better PageRank and are probably more important. It sounds about right for where the post should rank. But for other posts, that’s not what happens. Try this search – the exact wording of a post from around the same time on evaluating your student loan packages. What happens? I looked through the top 200 results – and my post doesn’t come up as any of them. For a unique phrase which has been used only on this site (and one spam site referring to it). My guess is that if I browsed through the top 1000 results, I wouldn’t show up there, either.

Why the difference? I think it’s something about the phrases. The Sandbox is an anti-spam tool – so maybe student loans are subject to spam, while telephone calls aren’t. Maybe if I’d used a slightly different word or phrase in each one it would have flipped the results. But the fact is that on some searches, the site is where you’d expect it to be. On others, it doesn’t show up at all – and there’s no good explanation I can think of for why, other than a filter.

I’ll also add a prediction: I think that these filters applied by Google are lifted in 30 day increments. So if you do something to trip a filter, it gets removed after some period of time has passed. I’ve noticed on many sites that this clocks in at exactly the three month mark, or 90 days. My prediction is that by the end of November, this site will have a sudden jump in traffic as the Sandbox, or part of it, gets lifted. It was founded in late July – meaning 90 days after that is late October. But I’m also factoring in the time it took for Google to find the site and the fact that in my experience, it can take a few weeks for Google to reflect the freshest information. Maybe I’ll be wrong – but if it happens, for me it’s pretty good evidence of the Sandbox.

What about Greg’s site? I still think he’d be better off hosting it on his main web site. The reason is this: take a look at this subpage. There’s unique text there about the kitchen – but if you type it into Google, the site doesn’t show up at all. My bet is that if you add up all the pages he’ll end up creating on individual sites, there will be a lot of descriptive text about the houses that are unique to each one. Which means that if someone types in a search about houses in Avondale, AZ with cherrywood cabinets, the same text on a single, older, main site might show up as a result – whereas it won’t with the new one. I’ve got no clue how many people this would really be. I’m just guessing from my own sites, where I get searches from all sorts of random iterations of whatever I wrote. The Bloodhound Realty traffic logs might show something different from what I expect (i.e., that people don’t search much for specific features of the house, etc.). But I do know that those are pretty lucrative searches – people pay a lot to get what a well-done site can get for free, especially in real estate. If you’re starting a web site, your mileage may vary. You may not care about whether people come to your site searching for certain things, because it may not be of value to you. I don’t know exactly how the Sandbox works – no one does – but I’m pretty sure that new sites are nearly always affected to at least some degree.

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Here’s a few I liked:

1) A company setting up christmas light displays

2) The turtlemobile – a guy who turns cars into strange advertising gimmicks

3) Dog manikins

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From Greg:

Whether you can get more blog traffic by posting on weekends, how you can lowball a home seller by being selective about when you make your offer, when the best time to list your house is, and problems that come up by moving before or after a closing date.

From Ardell:

Posts on how to price a house to take advantage of online listing price ranges, home staging, and a high school turned into a set of condos.      

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