Sandbox Filter Removed

[jacobwissler]

The sandbox filter has been removed; this has happened before late at night on a Saturday (early Sunday morning). I suspect it will be back to normal within a few hours. It also happened right after Christmas, for a few days.

Also, Google has revised the Directory, this time it is not an old version, but appears to be a truly new version. Perhaps a person must get up in the middle of the night to see these things.

[greeneagle]

Jacob,
Could you extrapolate on what tools you use to determine if the Google Sandbox Filter has been removed.
Thanks,
Ken

[jacobwissler]

Two of my new sites created last July (which were #1 in Yahoo and MSN but not doing well in Google) are now #1 in Google. I know from experience, this will go away in 3 to 12 hours, and return to "normal" meaning the lower sandbox SERP rankings.

Now, for the mystery, a site that has been up since 2002 and contains zero spam has disappeared from SERPS. http://www.jacobwissler.com has been number #1 on all search engines, when you search for my name ( a very uncompetitive term) until now. As of this morning, is dropped so low in SERPS that even I can't find it. It is still in the index and still has Rage Rank.

Perhaps GoDaddy was down when Google crawled it, but still, they crawl often and have many back up copies.

Can someone take a look and see what I am doing wrong with http://www.jacobwissler.com ?

[activeco]

Originally Posted by jacobwissler

I know from experience, this will go away in 3 to 12 hours, and return to "normal" meaning the lower sandbox SERP rankings.

For me it is just one more anti-sandbox proof.
Don't get me wrong; there IS some kind of strange filter, but I strongly disagree the Sandbox "new domain-time delay-etc" theory.

It is obvious that Google releases SERP from time to time without the filter, until it finishes a new computation of - something.
With time bomb it wouldn't be necessary, time would be part of the algo without delay.

I am tempted to believe in some kind of additional linking filter; the IBL counting towards PR, but the filter reducing SERP values based on some kind of grow of IBL in some period of time, as noted several times.
Also, the link networks are probably already part of the same filter, which would also take some time for gradual settlement of final SERP.

[tcampione]

Originally Posted by jacobwissler

I know from experience, this will go away in 3 to 12 hours, and return to "normal" meaning the lower sandbox SERP rankings.

Please say it ain't so.... My sandboxed site has moved to page 1.

I'm extremely hopeful that this is permanent.

[iamrussell]

My site has escaped from the sandbox and is listing on the first and second SERPs. It did not come out the time before, right after christmas. I think this may be something different and may last. Also, not all sites have come out of the sandbox. It seems like the sites that are coming up on their 1 year birthday are the ones that are coming out.

[mj2043]

I have seen people reporting release of some type of filter in Google, it is not clear whether sandbox or some other.

[cbp]

Not sure it removed or not, but my severely sandboxed site discussed in several other threads has made it up to 81st !!!

CBP

[DriWashSolutions]

Originally Posted by cbp

Not sure it removed or not, but my severely sandboxed site discussed in several other threads has made it up to 81st !!!

CBP

Yeah - my site has been hanging out in the 90's for a particular term,
and today when I checked googlerankings.com, it's #2 !!

I hope someone can shed some light as to what filter has been removed - it'll certainly shed some light.

[DannyS]

Our sites started in July, September and October 2004 are out of the sandbox but one from December 2004 is still in. For this one it lost it's allintext and allinanchor number one positions on at least one Google datacenter. I wonder if Google is changing some of the "allins" algos.
Danny

[cbp]

The allins have been a boit 'screwy' for a few days - I would not trust them for what they are supposed to show.

CBP

[Ace]

One of my site is under sandbox so it is not true that google has remove all sandbox. This Website is almost year old but my other site which is just 7 months old is now out of sandbox.

[sem4u]

Not all sanboxed sites have come out. One of mine is out and one is even deeper into the sandbox - cannot be easily found for the company name...

[intruder2600]

at my database lot of older websites has come out of sandbox - my too - from less tnan 800 place to about 180. But a lot of other websites was sandboxed now - out of results - absulutly without any reason...

what's going on ??!!

now it's a second day after changes and i think that it's going to stay like that,

panic !!!

[sandis.viksna]

I have about 900 pages in google for 3rd month and today! BAM! they are in index, but they are not brining any visitors! What is happening? They are a steady source of 50-100 visitors a day, and now they stoped. I wonder. Has anybody experienced something like this?

P.S. I should start to do some google calendaring to at last know in what periods it does something so crazy.

[sandis.viksna]

I have about 900 pages in google for 3rd month and today! BAM! they are in index, but they are not brining any visitors! What is happening? They are a steady source of 50-100 visitors a day, and now they stoped. I wonder. Has anybody experienced something like this?

P.S. I should start to do some google calendaring to at last know in what periods it does something so crazy.

[hasit]

i am facing a SIMILAR kind of a problem in G with my domainname.com

I somehow feel this is new way G is going to ignore/penalize the websites. Infact i was in SearchGuild.com to ask for a solution or the reason for it.

Let us try to compare what happned with your website and mine, so that might help us to come to a conclusion.

My website was not ranked well since last 3 months, suddenly the ranking started dropping. In a major update on 5th-Feb-2005, it seems that i am now not even with the non-competitive keyword, BUT, BUT BUT, my website is still founded in G cached pages, i do show up in top 50 if i type domainname in G.

I also own other website, in which i am facing the same problem.

I would hope experts could help US.

thanks, Hasit

[sandis.viksna]

Well, hasit, situation is like this:

I have that website now for over 11 months. The pags that was there more than 6 months, is still in google and are number 1 for specific keywords.

But the new pages, that I added in 2004. november, and latter was bringing in nice trafic, but this morning - they are nowhere altough google spiders these pages regulary. So, after 3 months I have a strange situation - I am in index for search site:www.mydomain.com, but trafic has droped.

Maybe google again is recalculationg something?

Here the dynamic of my pages hits (at 7th feb, ~13:00 (lol, 12 hits in 13 hours today):

2005-02-07 12
2005-02-06 131
2005-02-05 158
2005-02-04 231
2005-02-03 224
2005-02-02 162
2005-02-01 199
2005-01-31 152
2005-01-30 188
2005-01-29 151
2005-01-28 113
2005-01-27 160
2005-01-26 199

jumping up and down like mad

[jestep]

Im seeing the biggest changes I have ever seen in Google. Whatever thay did, it has changed a lot, even on sites that are well established.

[crankydave]

The changes for me are profound. Whatever has been done I, of course, agree with it. I checked my serps earlier this morning and the had reverted back to whence the came briefly but have moved back to their "new" (fingers and toes crossed!) position.

As a point of reference, I went live with my site around March-April of '04. Am I a "big kid" now being allowed to join the rest of them on the playground? If it is not being released from the "sandbox", new/different meaning/weight/value has been given to anchor text and IBL link text and perhaps how it relates to content. On the surface, I can't see another reason for such a dramatic change for me.

Dave

[smo]

My main site is four years old but I started working on it by adding content and submitting to directory etc on July 2004. Before that some few pages with contact details were there. I got good result after July 04 and every month traffic from G was growing at a rate of 50 %. Started with 9 per day in July and reached 340 hits/day from G at end of March. During this period I was adding content and updating my site regularly. Based on my growth rate and knowing that Sunday traffic almost 50% of normal day traffic I was expecting 200 hits from G on 6th Feb.

But it went to 463 for 6th Feb and now for Monday it has already crossed 475 and at this rate it will end with 1000/ hits ( from G ) for Monday. Almost 2.25 times increase in traffic from Google. Some sudden jump in traffic.

But my other sites are not so lucky.

[sandis.viksna]

You're lucky! 1000 hits a day! I am happy with stable 160/day. sometimes 180! very rare times about 200-220! :)

Ah you ;))) will see how it goes in the next few days!

[kservik]

ODP data is updated and showing in Google toolbar.

My sandboxed site jumped from spot 500 to 580....well done! :-)

That was after Google found the site in ODP... ^^

[infinity003]

We jumped from like 20 to 1. Can someone provide some insight into what exactly the sandbox theory is? Maybe a reference or something. I'm confused as to what is happening with the whole jump that happened today. Can someone provide some insight for us "lamen"?

Thanks,
Greg

[jestep]

Can someone provide some insight into what exactly the sandbox theory is?

Basically the sandbox is a filter that makes it so newer sites cannot rank well for competitive search terms until the site has been around for a certain amount of time. Do a search on google for 'google sandbox' and you will find tons of references and info.

IMO, this is not just a change in the sandbox filter. This is a complete algo shift. I am seeing huge changes on sites that have been around for years as well as sites that were in the sandbox. I think google changed alot more than the sandbox filter.

[infinity003]

Thanks for that reply. I will check out that theory. Is there anything else related to this that I should know about... does anyone have any ideas as to if this might change back to the old way, or can we count on doing well for the future? I suppose a lot of stuff is speculation.

[infinity003]

Thanks for that reply. I will check out that theory. Is there anything else related to this that I should know about... does anyone have any ideas as to if this might change back to the old way, or can we count on doing well for the future? I suppose a lot of stuff is speculation.

[gmiller]

Posts on other sites seem to indicate that Google has moved a number of sites from the primary index to the secondary index ("sandbox") and shifted some sites from the secondary to the primary.

This seems to support the currently popular theory that Google's document IDs are still 32 bits, limiting them to a little over 4 billion pages per index. If this theory is correct, we should continue to see shuffles like this over time until they eventually adapt their database structures to support 40 bit IDs (or whatever approach they end up using to resolve this), at which point, we'd see the sandbox go away suddenly.

[cbp]

Google's document IDs are still 32 bits,

Google have denied that this is a problem.

CBP

[I am Nick]

I started optimizing my company's webpages in the beggining of 2003. We made it to top 10 with all targeted keywords for all searh engines. These where not any of the major worldwide keywords though, i.e. never ever more than a few million competing pages.

Todays things are more difficult as more people are optimizing their webpages.

However, I remained doing good for some sites until the infamous florida update when many of them vitually dissapeared from Google (though still did good with MSN and Yahoo, etc.).

Lately I have focused on getting more inbound links to my sites, mainly by submitting to various directories, PR 0-9 (mostly 0). Only one of them accepted by DMOZ, OPD, as they see them as one webpage (non of the wepages I am talking about was accepted). It seams like one of the sites I have focused on is out of the sandbox. So, penalty for many links in a short time do not apply. The site that is out and doing good is the one that used to rank good...

Food for thoughts, for thoose of you who are trying to draw conlusions...

Cheers Nick

[Guido]

I've been in the sand box for a while now.[september 2004]
All in anchor shows me on place 11 - 19 in a very competitive keyphrase, but normal Serps about 300 - 500.

the last days start on wednesday last week my site going down from 330 -> 560 and more. and suddenly Saturday the site goes high again to 214 and now between serp 19 - 27 by over 20.000.000 entries.

[stephenmunday]

Google sandbox or Google ****-up.

The more screwy stuff like this happens, the more I begin to subscribe to the latter theory....

[Deep13]

I personally feel that google is upto something...

because I am keeping an eye on listing of my few sites...

I optimized a totally new site recently, as expected it came in top 20 in the begining and suddently google kicked it back...

but now...something strange is going on...

I had seen it on 37th Position, then 20th and now suddently out of the listing....

same thing happened with my company site too...
It was on 11th - 12th for sometime...then suddently out of the index...

and now on 5th position...

I think google might be testing some new filter...

Regards
Deep

[I am Nick]

I regret to inform you that my brief slip out of the sandbox is over. I am back there...

[virtualtraveller]

After 5 months my modest website about Chiang Mai in Thailand came out the sandbox. It immediately ranked 10th for the fairly comeptitive kw 'chiang mai' and ranked between 1 & 3 for about a dozen other significant kws related to tourism. We had obviously done our homework properly. Unfortunately we had just added our site to about 200 directories which are all now beginning to appear - the sudden spike did us no good and within a week we were back in the sandbox.

No doubt google games are afoot, but I'm quite sure that the sandboxing filter measures the rise in your links relative to time and existing links. IMO more than 10 a week could be harmful. Someone else I know launched a site similar to mine around about the same time, he was ranking within 2-3 months, interestingly when I was let out of the sandbox I ranked about 14 places higher than him (20th vs 24th.)

Very frustrating. Our site is genuinely good and useful and deserves to rank, seems google is shooting themselves in the foot with their zealous mission to prevent spam ranking.

[sandis.viksna]

So far my site trafic reduced by 60% and today is day number 2 : ((( wheee... I'm craying!

[hawkwind dave]

I've also seen two of my 'problem' sites hurtle into page one, hope it lasts....but I daren't hold my breath.

It's one year (almost to the week) since they dropped like a stone, I wonder if we'll see a similar sand-algo-filter-box update this time next year.

[crankydave]

Originally Posted by hawkwind dave

I've also seen two of my 'problem' sites hurtle into page one, hope it lasts....but I daren't hold my breath.

It's one year (almost to the week) since they dropped like a stone, I wonder if we'll see a similar sand-algo-filter-box update this time next year.

I'm holding on to my "new" positions so far. In the past they reverted by now.

Dave

[hawkwind dave]

I don't think I've ever been so nervous regarding SERPs before this week.

"Google! For the sake of my clients, please don't touch anything!"

[buddhu]

Definitely some odd stuff going on.

Around the end of December Google wiped all our backlinks out of link:domain and showed none. Around the same time we were dropped from the index for a day or so.

Yesterday a lot of our backlinks showed up again, and at the same time we have made some recovery in the SERPs (we dropped a place or two when the strange stuff happened).

[crankydave]

Originally Posted by hawkwind dave

I don't think I've ever been so nervous regarding SERPs before this week.

"Google! For the sake of my clients, please don't touch anything!"

LOL! I know how you feel!

Dave

[jestep]

Looks like google reverted back to what it was before this change. Maybe they are just shuffling around, or maybe they did just screw up.

[crankydave]

Originally Posted by jestep

Looks like google reverted back to what it was before this change. Maybe they are just shuffling around, or maybe they did just screw up.

I'm not seeing that for the phrases I'm watching.

Dave

[jestep]

I just check about 30 datacenters, and they are about split in half. Half are the old SERPS and half are the updated SERPS that we have been seeing. Hopefully they will all switch to the new SERPS.

[freehits]

went from 1 IBl on google to 150 when this happened, dropped from page 1 of 500K to page 3.

Now we are back to 1 IBL and still on page 3, also we have all seen some old caches.

The sites that have moved above us are non relevent garbage for the most part. We are #1 on MSn and YAHOO for the term in question.

to many peoples income is often associated with the position changes of such magnitude. A nice market split of 33/33/33 favors all of the users in a sense of creating true competition and stability.

[crankydave]

Originally Posted by jestep

I just check about 30 datacenters, and they are about split in half. Half are the old SERPS and half are the updated SERPS that we have been seeing. Hopefully they will all switch to the new SERPS.

Absolutely! Mine briefly popped back to the old, and now back to "new" again.

Dave

[coder]

We purchased a brand new domain Jan 28, launched the site Jan 31. On Feb 3 the site was ranked #3 and since then it moved up to the #2 and now sits on the #4 position.

We probably have around 15 ibl's and there are 53,600 results for the term.

So with these results i'd have to say the sandbox has been removed.

[activeco]

So, how many of you guys remained well in the new serps and how many went back to the "sandbox" (if you insist on that term)?

[tcampione]

Originally Posted by activeco

So, how many of you guys remained well in the new serps and how many went back to the "sandbox" (if you insist on that term)?

My 8.5 month old site made it out of the box.

Prior to Feb 7, I was anywhere from #56 to 136 (pool 2.5 million) for my most important.

I'm now #5 or 6, depending on the DC.

[activeco]

Thanks tcampione.
Have you done anything regarding linking campaign for the site in the meantime? I am primarily interested in pace of getting IBLs.

To the thread starter jacobwissler: are your two sites still #1 at Google?