Playing the Google Sandbox
David Rosam on May 01 2007 at 6:49 pm | Filed under: Google, SEO copywriting, Search Engine Optimization, Search engines
The Google Sandbox is the part of the Google algorithm that keeps new sites out of the top pages for popular natural search results. If you have a new site, you’re potentially sandboxed for up to 12 months - we give 9-12 months as a rule of thumb. That’s maybe up to a year of investment in Organic SEO, with little immediate to show for it.
But, like most things on the Web, you’re not 100% certain of being sandboxed. It’s only for the really high traffic key phrases that the sandbox operates. Somewhere, there’s a line, below which Google will be happy to list you up there on the first page.
In fact, we’ve discovered that as we dig deeper and deeper in key phrase research for our clients, we have found ourselves recommending key phrases that it later turns out they have not been sandboxed for - in some cases to our great surprise. So we find ourselves recommending a mix of high-traffic key phrases as an investment for the future - they’ll kick in when the site emerges from the sandbox - and some that we might just get some immediate results for.
If we do succeed, then maybe we can save our client some PPC click-through budget.
