Google results without the Google sandbox?

The Google Sandbox is a method that Google employs that delays the impact of anchor text on a page’s search engine rankings. Those SEO’s who deal with link building on a large scale are acutely aware of its impact, and it is a cause for a great deal of frustration.

The Google Sandbox is an issue I’ve covered here so much before that it now has it’s own Google Sandbox category here.

The latest news on sandboxing is that Netizen at the SEO-Guy forums reports in the thread View the SERPs without a sandbox that you can see Google results with Sandboxing removed by adding a nonesense code string to the end of your chosen search query:

searchphrase -sdfsdfq -ddsf -dsfsqdf -dqdfqsdf -dqfsdfqsd -sqdfqsd -sdfsdqfqsdf -sqdfqsdfqs -qsdfqsdf -sdfsqdfqsdf -sqfqsdfqsd -sdfqsdfsq -sdfqsdfsdf -qsdfqsdf

When carrying out searches with the above you can certainly see a different set of results returned. The big question, of course, is whether these results reflect the removal of actual sandboxing? For that, the answer has to be “yes and no, but…”

Certainly the results I’ve personally checked do seem to better reflect actual expected rankings without sandboxing. However, similar results can be achieved using Google allinanchor: allinurl: allintitle: allintext: searches, which order Google’s results by means of specified factors. Results in such
instances are not good predictors of future results because they cause the display of results returned according to a very narrow criteria.

Similarly, it would be impossible to tell at this time whether adding the code to the end of the search phrase were actually indicating coming results, or whether the search engine results pages (SERPs) were actually returned on an as yet unspecified combination of such factors.

Also, another uncomfortable fact is that after Google’s infamous Florida Update of November 2003, pre-Florida results were still accessible by adding a nonsense word code string to the end of keyphrase queries. However, this provided insights in results lost, rather than future results. A similar process could be at work with this latest method, where the results are shown before a specific filter (or set of filters) are applied.

Either way, it is a very interesting observation, and many webmasters - myself included - can only hope that this apparent window through the sandbox is indeed precisely that, rather than a false lead.