Google Sandbox: A Waiting Lounge or an Opportunity for Site Development?

Hi,
You did your research on a business niche, anticipated its profitability, and decided to develop a new website or blog around that niche in order to make money. It took you quite some time figuring out the ideal design for your site and you finally came up with one. Ultimately, you completed the design of your site successfully. Following this, you started researching online for some suitable content and began to write content for your own blog or site. This took another few months until your website got ready and you decided to launch it.

You wrote some articles to get some quick baclinks, exchanged a few links with related websites, and submitted your site or blog to the search engine giant Google. Now, you have been waiting for your site to show up in the search results for a couple of months but still your site does not appear in the search results even for your business name. And you are left wondering as to what could be the reason for this?

As a webmaster, you might have heard the term "Google Sandbox" and might as well be wondering as to what exactly this means? The purpose of this article is to deal exactly with this. The phenomenon of new websites doing really bad in the Google search results dates back to the beginning of 2004, prior to which it was not noticed by anyone. Plenty of people looking to make a fortune online were experiencing this with their websites and the issue started to get the attention of the search engine optimization community such as webmasterworld.com, seochat.com, seroundtable.com etc. The term "Google Sandbox" was first coined by seroundtable.com when one of their clients purchased thousands of baclinks which boosted the pagerank of their site to a PR 8. However, instead of dominating the main keywords relating to their business, their site could hardly get 50 unique visitors in a single day.

It is obvious from the name "Google Sandbox" that the term refers to the sand moving steadily but very slowly to the lower chamber of an hourglass. Here the question arises as to what exactly is the length of the sandbox period? The answer is that there is no hard and fast time period in months for all sites. Instead, it varies from one business niche to another and depends on how competitive that niche is. Consequently, the sandbox for your particular niche may turn out to be 1-2 months only while for highly competitive industries such as banking, finance and mortgage, online services, web hosting etc, the period may be as long as 6-10 months. Another question that may be bugging your mind now is why this sandbox is used by Google?

The answer to this is quite simple. There are plenty of scammers who are looking to exploit a money-making opportunity by purchasing links, only to disappear as soon as their business has been spotted as a scam. Google wants to discourage such people or groups while knowing that waiting for a few months is not a big deal for legitimate businesses like you who are planning to serve their customers for many years to come.

To conclude with, if you have launched a new website and have done some work to improve its link popularity, you should not be worried if it's not appearing in the search results right away. You should not consider the sandbox period as if you are sitting in a waiting lounge and are getting desperate for you bus or airline to arrive. Instead, you should take the "Google Sandbox" as an opportunity for you newly launched website. Instead of losing heart and giving up during the sandbox period, you should show patience and perseverance and continue to develop new content and build strong backlinks, knowing that one day the sandbox filter will be lifted off of your site. And when that happens, you can expect to receive a handsome amount of traffic from Google because your site will easily outperform your competitors because of the more content that it now has as well as the backlinks.