I hate long walks on the beach-How to avoid the sandbox

Deliguy · #1 (**permalink**) 10-16-2005, 07:11 PM

Some believe in the search engine sandbox theory and some don't. I couldn't tell you either way, but it's unescapable that there is definitely an effect there; a bad effect. I personally see the sandbox effect as a warning sign telling me my site may potentially be penalized later on. So all good and interested publishers must put careful planning into affect to avoid the sandboxes.

Through my various new and old projects I have developed a plan for new sites that manages to beat the sandbox effect. The plan takes into account what I call the five primary factors of search engine ranking.

1)Quality of content-Does your site fit a theme? Does ALL of your site's content fit this theme with clear well written text marked in paragraphs and complete sentences? Look for places in your site that uses "one liners". Turn those one liners into headings and follow it with a paragraph about that subject. Forget keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is a thing of the past. Also, navigation structure falls into this category and whether or not your site uses static links/static pages.

2)Quantity of content-How many pages does your site have? There's one main rule for this; The more the better.

3)Quality of inbound links-How many sites link to yours? This includes your entire domain, I don't waste my time checking to see how many sites link to my main page. Both msn and Yahoo have linkdomain: features you can use to see this.

4)Quality of inbound links-Are the sites that link to you a close cousin? Try to get sites that relate to yours to link to you. This step shouldn't be taken lightly. The way I estimate is that one related link is worth 10 misc links. For instance with my newer project (Plex Home Theater if you don't mind me plugging) I'm trying to rank for the phrase "home theater". Most of the sites that rank top 10 have 100,000+ inbound links, but one only has about 2,700 inbound. How did he get to top 10? He scored top 10 because almost 80% of those inbound links come from sites related to home theater or consumer electronics.

5)Environmental Factors- How old is your site? Is it an information site or a shopping site? How often is it updated? Most of these factors can only be delt with through time and consistancy. Be patient and predictable.

These five factors are the basis for my formula to avoid the sandboxes. My formula is also very easy to understand.

Balanced + Predictable + Balanced Links= No Sandbox

Balanced-The sanbox looks for sites that gain links too fast? This to some people seems obsured. They want as many links as they can get and they feel they should get them as fast as possible. This is 100% true. However, how come you don't see brand new sites that end up on CNN and gaining thousands of links a day get trapped in the sandbox? This is because when you see your site suddenly get slammed with visitors and links you rush to make updates to keep those visitors coming back. This one piece of advice is EXTREMELY useful with a little bit of practice. Write content months in advanced! Then watch how fast you gain links. The faster you gain links the faster you should increase the size of your site. Keep everything balanced. If the search engines see tons of links and no new content, that throws red flags up. This takes care of the Quantity of content and quantity of inbound links factors

Be Predictable-Look at certain spam techniques such as cloaking, doorway pages, content theft. They are all consistant of one thing. Dynamic updates. Even if you have dynamic content never let your content appear dynamic. Dynamic content is too unpredictable for search engines. Make sure your updates are consitant. With a veteran site, I stick by the 1 update/day rule of thumb. More than that makes my site look dynamic, less than that makes it look below what would be considered "fresh". However keep in mind the balanced factor. If your gaining hundred+ of links a day. Update twice a day. If your gaining less update 1/day. Eitherway be predictable, don't update four times in one one day and then leave for a week. As an example my new home theater website PlexHomeTheater.com, I wrote 300 articles on home theater. Once a day I have a script that posts a new article on the main page, and adds the article to the archives. If I see links start gaining too fast. I speed up the script to twice per day. Eitherway it's static content, and it fits these two factors while allowing me to go nuts with my link campaign. This covers the quality of content and envirnmental factors. For those veteran SEO experts that would like to prove or disprove this point, try consitantly updating your site exactly once per week. You may notice after about a month that google and yahoo will naturally start deep crawling your site once a week. Then try switching to once a day. After a little while longer you may start to notice them deep crawling your site once a day. Then try to update it four times a day. It may shock you to watch them deep crawling your site once or twice a week again. Search engine engineers have one job, to know and study us webmasters. Us webmasters have one job, to know and study the engineers. It's a vicious cycle, so if you can't beat em join em.

Balanced Links-As mentioned above, it's safe to guess that 1 quality link is equal to about 10 low quality links. Search engines look very closely at that ratio. It's natural for a site to gain low quality links, it's also natural for a site to gain quality links. So before you go post to hundreds of FFA link pages, try to stay balanced on your links. Gain 1 quality link for every 10 low quality links you gain. You don't have to be exact, but as long as you have both and gain at about the same pace the sandbox should let you pass on by.

Thanks for reading my article. I hope this helps as many people as possible. If anyone has any questions or comments they are welcome to post them.

aaron2005 · #2 (**permalink**) 10-17-2005, 09:03 AM

I am finding the things I didn't plan got better results, I wish I never visits a "search engine forum" from that day on all went down hill. ;-(

DMC_34 · #3 (**permalink**) 10-17-2005, 09:34 AM

Nice read.

I do not agree with the content part dismissing the sandbox effect. IMO sandbox is merely a factor of:

Link age and/or domain age with a trust factor mixed in.

My site in the signature is and has been indexed daily by Google for the last 6 months. I run dynamic content which mimics static pages. IMO content increases index frequency but has very little to do with actually ranking on Google and nothing to do with the sandbox.

Quote:

If the search engines see tons of links and no new content, that throws red flags up. This takes care of the Quantity of content and quantity of inbound links factors

Not necessarily. Harry and David has very little content yet they recieve a slew of natural IBL's due to popularity and rank extremely well. I could name a few others.

All in you make some good observations and good advice.

DMC

Deliguy · #4 (**permalink**) 10-18-2005, 01:14 AM

My point behind the article was based off of an assumption. The assumption that the sandbox effect is a tool used by search engines to discredit/verify potential spammers for future penalties. There are two basic types of spam, link spam and content spam. It is asinine to think search engines only use the sandbox algorythms to check for link spam.

Since it is basically impossible to say why a particular site has been placed in the sandbox it boils down to being better safe than sorry. I have found in my own experience that the method above serves as a safe POA. Whether or not every piece of that advice pertains directly to what will and what won't place you in the sandbox can only be answered by the search engineers.