Comments on: The Google “Sandbox” Effect Simplified

By: Goldy

Goldy — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 16:23:10 +0000

Does someone know what’s the average duration of the “Sandbox mode”? I had my first site and it was just 3 months of waiting, and now my existing sites is almost 5 months old but still in the Sandbox. I guess it’s because it’s more competitive, just like the article stated.

By: SEO UK Expert

SEO UK Expert — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 15:35:18 +0000

I have had a site going for a few months now and seemed to be going well, then all of a sudden it has dropped about 50 places in Google. ICould this be some kind of delayed sandbox effect?

By: Matthew Zim

Matthew Zim — Sat, 05 May 2007 06:36:49 +0000

And add to that, Google lists 600 of our pages. That’s not the problem. The issue is 1. Very few googlebot visits 2. Very poor ranking in Google search results (home page not displayed!) 3. traffic from Google greatly down since our remote host went temporarily down.

By: Matthew Zim

Matthew Zim — Sat, 05 May 2007 03:29:05 +0000

Hmmm…that’s surprising. Sorry, I see my description was a little over-emphatic. When I said ‘Googlebot has not revisited’ – that’s true for most of the site, but we have had four pages newly indexed, out of a total of about 1,200 pages.

By: Dave Davis

Dave Davis — Fri, 04 May 2007 15:25:48 +0000

Hi Mattew. This does not appear to be a “Reverse Sandbox”. To me it looks like you have been banned from Google for some reason. globalpropertyguide.com is showing the “Grey bar of death”.

You should check in webmaster central if you are suffering any penalties.

By: Matthew Zim

Matthew Zim — Fri, 04 May 2007 11:04:12 +0000

Hi. Our site was chugging along at around 900 uniques a day till mid-March, when it suddenly shot up to around 1,400 and seemed to be steadily rising. Halleluyah! Most of this new traffic was from Google, consistent with an ‘end of sandbox’ effect – we’d done nothing else of note.

Then early April we got hit by a day’s server down time. As luck would have it Google was crawling that day. We zoomed down to 550 uniques. Our cached Google links were eventually restored to us after three weeks, but traffic has not recovered, and Googlebot has not revisited, so new pages remain uncrawled. Is this a ‘return of the sandbox’ effect? I haven’t seen anything written about the effect coming and going. It’s usually described as a one-off process, you get out of it, and that’s that. What’s happening to us? What is the cause of this strange behaviour?

By: Dave Davis

Dave Davis — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 19:45:51 +0000

Thanks Dave. I have subscribed to your blog.

By: David Temple

David Temple — Sun, 24 Dec 2006 18:54:47 +0000

Nope I think that about covers it and covers it well with a simple explanation. Good job!