Avoiding The Google Sandbox from RevaHealth.com on Vimeo.

When we launched RevaHealth.com, like most online businesses, it was critical for us to rank well in Google. So we did all the normal SEO work: we ticked the onpage boxes, we secured some good quality links (including some from the Guardian, the Telegraph and the Daily Mail) and we targeted long tail keywords that didn’t have much competition.

After about four months it started to become clear that despite all our SEO work, things were not going according to plan. We weren’t ranking well for anything except our own brand name. We could find our pages in Google, so we were being indexed, we just weren’t ranking in the top 10 or even in the top 40.
Our frustration grew with each week. What was even worse was that there were many inferior sites ranking ahead of us. This was now costing us money. Because we weren’t getting organic traffic we had to use Google Adwords to bootstrap the business – an expensive proposition.
We became convinced that we were doing something wrong. So we began the long and painful process of analysing everything we did. We looked at URL structure, internal linking, duplicate content, placement of information on the page – everything. We found problems, but nothing on the scale that would prevent Google from ranking us. This was now a real puzzler, as we were ranking well for both Yahoo and Microsoft.
Around this time we read about the Google Sandbox. This is reportedly the place where Google fence-in new domains for a period of about one year. During this period it is almost impossible to rank well for anything other than your brand name.
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The apparent reason for this sandboxing is that Google just doesn’t trust you yet – you are the new kid on the block and you need to prove yourself. At the time the reported sandbox was little more than rumour and speculation. And like most SEO elements, it was impossible to prove it really existed, so we continued bashing our heads trying to get ranked.
February 2008, it all changed. It was like someone had flicked a switch. All of a sudden we started ranking. Now, don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t like moving from position 50 up to the giddy heights of position 1, but literally 100s of our key phrases were on the second page and several were on the first page. Looking back, nothing significant had changed on our site. There were no new high PR pages linking to us and we hadn’t made any major structural changes to the site. But, all of a sudden, Google trusted us.
The Google Sandbox is now pretty much accepted SEO wisdom. If you are setting up an online business, avoiding or minimising the Google Sandbox has to be a priority.
How to minimise the affect of the Google Sandbox
  1. Don’t register your domain through a proxy. There are loads of services out there that can hide your personal details when registering a domain. While this at first seems like a harmless thing to do, it means that when Google looks at your domain registration information, (and yes, it does do this) it can tell it was registered by proxy. The problem with this is that loads of web spammers register their domains through proxies. Unfortunately, you get lumped in with them and it takes you much longer to get out of the sandbox.
  2. Register your domain early. Get your website online as early as possible with 6-10 pages of content and a couple of inbound links. If you are thinking of starting a business, get it done today. Everyday its up there is a day less you have to spend in the sandbox when your business eventually goes live.
  3. Get someone else to buy your domain. Sandboxing is something that doesn’t seem to affect major companies. When someone like Procter and Gamble buys a new domain they don’t seem to get sandboxed. It is speculated that this is because Google looks at the domain registration information and sees that P&G doesn’t create spammy sites. Therefore, any domains that P&G create automatically have a degree of trust associated with them. If you’ve never registered a domain or built a trusted site, then Google have no inherent trust in you. However, what you can do, is get someone you know who has set up trusted domains, (and no spammy ones) to register your domain under their name. That way you should minimise the impact of the sandbox. Just make sure you trust them!
  4. Buy a domain with content. Buy a domain that is already out of the Google Sandbox, but don’t transfer the domain registration information immediately. Next, slowly and gradually replace the existing content on the domain with your own content and finally, months later, transfer the registration information. It is really important here that you check all of the inbound links to the domain, to make sure no spammers link to it. Note: this tactic is risky and has been known to fail, with all Page Rank erased and the domain sandboxed as if it were brand new .
As with all SEO, nothing can be proven (other than results) and everything changes all the time. What is true today may not be true tomorrow. So by all means use any of these ideas, but at your own risk!