Frustrated by Google’s sandbox? For the uninitiated, the “sandbox” effect occurs when Google seems to index your new site, but for months, and in some cases over a year, your site doesn’t appear in the search engine results for your desired keywords.

There’s lots of argument about whether the sandbox does or does not exist. I think it does, because I’ve seen the effects first-hand at angelabooth.com, my own site (see ** footnote). When the site went live in October 2005, it took around six months for any pages to start ranking at all. In the past three months, the site has more or less left the sandbox.

Chris Pearson’s article “A Graphical Look at the Effects of the Google Sandbox” notes that relevant content, and trust, is the key to escaping the sandbox:

As you accrue content on your Web site, you provide more and more avenues for people to access your material via Google. But, if your site’s pages are not counted among Google’s trusted ranks, then your chances of having someone access your content via search are about as good as your chances of winning the lottery.

The interesting thing about the trusted ranks, though, is that your site actually joins them one page at a time — it’s not just an all-in process. The longer pages exist and the more traffic and links they receive, the more likely they are to eventually join the trusted ranks.

You need patience to escape the sandbox
If you’ve got a site that’s lingering in the sandbox, you need patience, and the willingness to toil in obscurity to escape it. Get content onto your site - relevant content.

And no, I don’t mean shovel any old sh*t online and hope that your 10,000 pages of drivel will boost you to #1 on a SERP. They won’t. In fact, if you focus on CONTENT AS PAGE-WEIGHT you’re digging a deep hole in the sandbox and may never escape the supplemental results.

Create good, useful content, and you can soar out of the sandbox, much faster than you think.

** Footnote: Buy the domain name for YOUR OWN NAME. As primarily a print copywriter, author and journalist, I didn’t bother registering my own domain name for many years. Big mistake. I wish I’d tossed up an angelabooth.com two-page brochure site in 1995, instead of focusing on other domains that I own. AGE counts in domain-name trust.

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