Google Sandbox revisited revisited

So, Rand Fishkin asks about the Sandbox, and posts some interesting comments from the New York SES, trying to piece together suggestions from Matt Cutts, that Google maybe is applying an automated filter known as the Google Sandbox, and that the results may even come under human review.

I can only see Google implementing an automated control, and that either a direct WHOIS look up, or algo based on page caching dates, is used as part of that process we call the Google Sandbox.

Whichever methods and parameters are actually used, the practical reality is that relatively newer domains are simply harder to get rankings for than relatively older domains.

I can see the benefits of Google using this for trying to tackle spam issues - but it still seems like punishing the majority for the infractions of the minority - teacher putting the entire class into detention because of a few misbehaving boys at the back.

Personally, I always hated that - when you feel you have legitimate sites affected in this manner, it simply feels so unfair. But the world isn’t fair, and business is business - so it can simply be a case of expanding your methods to achieve your goals. I never touched anything really blackhat until I hit the sandbox for the first time last year. I didn’t continue those methods, but there are some ugly stains on my hat now from it.

While the Google Sandbox remains mysterious, and webmasters have no real information to work with, then there’s little we can do to try and work with the system - so no wonder Google are sitting quiet on it.

But I’m still not convinced that the sandbox approach is necessarily the best way to tackle spam issues. Not when that essentially condemns links simply for being links when it comes to newer domains. Surely issues of relevancy and quality are core issues in search?

Xan has posted some interesting perceptions on SEO, and helps show why Information Retrieval dislikes SEO - it sees us as diminishing their quality of results. Yet the counter argument is surely that at its heart SEO is simply about improving accessibility, as I’ve written about in reply.

The number of SEO’s here who might try and rank off-topic content - such as porn sites for the keyword “Disney” - are surely diminuituve - the buzzwords are conversion, and if the traffic doesn’t convert properly, it can be an effective waste of money to develop. So SEO nowadays is surely focussed on relvancy - and that surely means there can be a broad area of overlap between the interests of SE’s and SEO’s.

The sandbox seems a slap against that - an indication that Google will try and protect it’s index against influence as much as possible - even if that means a loss of relevancy - yesterday’s search today, today’s search in the sandbox. The views of old and often outdated content as regarded as more important that today’s updated content.

Whatever the sandbox is, it also seems to be changing. Last year, when I first encountered it, a straight 3 months was about all that was required to leave it. Now it seems that factors such as numbers of links acquired play a bigger role, and that it has become less of the Google Sandbox as the Google Quicksand, where newer domains are probably best approaching link development in small doses - because in too large number too quickly it looks like you can get stuck, and if you try and struggle by throwing more links in, you could just add to the problem, rather than escape it.

Either way, the core question was how much reliance should be made on suggestions that Google holds sites back, and involves a process of manual review of that. Certainly Google is holding sites back under a set criteria, and this process is almost certainly mostly automated. If it were simply a case of manually reviewing them, then a lot more sites should be out of it sooner.