How to get into the Google Sandbox

by Patrick Altoft on July 13, 2007 / 5 responses

Since most internet marketers offer advice on avoiding the Google Sandbox I thought it would be fun to give some tips on how you can get your new site into the sandbox with just a few simple steps.

The sandbox is the place websites go before they have earned enough trust to get good Google rankings. Once a site gets enough trust it moves out of the sandbox and into the trustbox and your traffic increases. Some sites never earn enough trust to achieve top rankings and the number and quality of links to achieve good rankings varies dramatically across different niches.

The key point to remember is that for each competitive search term there are only 10 sites that can rank on the front page (9 if you assume Wikipedia will be in the top 10). Even if your mortgage website has 500,000 links it still won’t rank at number 1 unless it has more trust than all the other mortgage sites.

Common symptoms of the sandbox are not ranking for the keywords in your title tags and also being outranked by popular bloggers who cover your stories. For example if you write a blog post about a new gadget and the post is covered by Gizmodo and Engadget they will rank on the first page for the gadgets name while you will be nowhere to be found, even though they link to you as the source.

A lot of people blame the sandbox for their sites not ranking very well. In most cases it is just due to the fact the site doesn’t have enough links. As a general rule unless your site has more quality (natural) links than the top ranking competitor sites it’s probably not sandboxed.

How to get into the sandbox:

• 1) Get the site indexed using your signature at Digital Point
• 2)Submit to 500 free web directories
• 3) Publish articles on your website and submit them to 200 article directories
• 4) Use ezine articles to find content for your website
• 5) Sell sitewide links
• 6) Buy sitewide links

Next week: how to get into the trustbox

Post category: Google Tweet

Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.