It’s the Google Trustbox, Not Sandbox

Mincing words? Maybe. But a guest post over at stuntdubl has a good argument about why calling it the “Sandbox” may be misleading.

First, what is the Sandbox?

A sandbox is not a penalty or even a ‘thing’ - it’s a collection of filters in G’s algo that causes a site (not a page) to not rank well for a period of time.

But why trust?

• [It commonly hits sites] released for the first time
• Filters are applied to certain keywords, and not to others
• Filters are usually applied for 6 months, but can be applied for up to 2 years
• Filters will look for behaviour of SEO’s or spamsters [including]
  • Talked about getting listed in lots of directories as one
  • Also talked about getting general directories rather than specific niche directories that are highly relevant to your product and service offering
  • Talked about getting links from sites that are known to sell links
  • Talked about getting lots of traffic as something that can not only keep you out of the sandbox, but a definite proven method to get you out once you are in!
  • Of course a good by-product of getting an authority site to send you initial traffic is that they often lead to your gathering a number of OWL’s
    from other sites.

    Eg. Prweb article gets picked up by Y and G newsfeeds and in turn these 3 sites will be read by thousands. This could lead to your site either being republished online by other news sites, or just in webmasters giving you a link because they like your article. So between the lines something that probably has an impact is your gathering natural looking OWL (one way links) after getting the quality link.