Demystifying the Google Sandbox

Jennifer Laycock, editor of Search Engine Guide, has an excellent down-to-earth article about the Google Sandbox. The way she classifies the reasoning behind the effect known as the Sandbox goes a long way toward demystifying why some sites avoid the Sandbox with ease while others can’t get away from its oppressive nature for close to and beyond a year.

The answer, she explains, is in the competition:

What there IS, is a growing understanding on the part of Google and other engines that they need to deliver quality results. That means that new sites are going to be judged and “allowed” to rank based on how they compare to the sites that already exist in the index. After all, how many mortgage application sites does Google really need to list? Why should they think that your brand new mortgage site is any more worthy of a ranking than the 1.5 million (yes, MILLION) sites that are already indexed for the phrase “mortgage application.”

I wrote a bit about the lack of a sandbox back during the 30 Day Lactivist project. Readers of the series will remember that I started getting Google traffic to my brand spanking new domain within a week of launching the site. I even gathered some great top ten rankings for phrases that people actually search for. No sandbox effect in play there.

Why? Because there weren’t 1.5 million sites out there selling breastfeeding t-shirts. In fact, there were only 46,000 sites listed for the more generic “breastfeeding shirts.” Thus…Google could see that they had “content holes” on that topic and they were more than happy to let my site in. Especially since it had good content, relevant keywords and a steady growth of incoming links. All of those things told Google “this site fills a need and people like it.”

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Is that mortgage site I mentioned filling a need? Do people like it? Perhaps…but they’re going to have a LOT harder time convincing Google of that. Thus…it’s going to take a lot longer for Google to “see the light” and decide that they should let that site in the door.

I like that explanation. Simple, yet complete. Webmasters and companies tend to get caught up in the “magic” of search engine rankings, yet seem to lose sight so easily as to why they deserve rankings above their long-established competitors. Because they are willing to pay for it. Bah! What makes their website/offering/portal better than the next? Answer that and you’re one step closer to achieving top rankings.

It’s no wonder that natural link growth as a result of linkable content and information wins the long haul. Call it “link bait.” Call it whatever you want. It still rules SEO.