the sandbox

[JulianM]

You guys have probably talked about this, but I don't find any threads using the search... nonetheless, apologies if this is a repeat.

Do you think there is a Sandbox effect and if yes, what is it exactly? Does it depend on how competitive the search term is?

I had a website that went to the third spot in Google two days after I bought the domain and put a little content, but the term wasn't competitive. With terms over which battles are raging what kind of time frame would you expect for the site to rank well, people say 6-9 months, what do you think?

[Darksat]

The sandbox is a crude explanation given by those semi skilled in SEO to explain various factors in the google algorithm that affect and slow down ranking.
You really want to look up temporal link analysis.
http://darksat.x47.net/topic/83.0.html
&
http://techunix.technion.ac.il/~uriw/Temporal_link_analysis.pdf

Eg your links gain power over time and google watches out for sudden amounts of links that look like they have come from nowwhere.
This prevents huge amounts of artificial link building (unless you get creative with PR)

[trace]

i fid the sand box to be random. it affects about half my new sites keeping them out of the serps while the other half do great right from the start.

[Darksat]

I will stick up a thread on bypassing the sandbox at some stage.

[trace]

I'd love to read it darksat. I didn't think there was a way to avoid the sandbox.

[Darksat]

There is always a way.
 

[solidghost]

Buy over Google? 

[Darksat]

Its a bit easier than that.

[Defcon 5]

reverse engineer googles algorithm?

[Darksat]

A little harder than that.
Working out a mathamatical formula is fairly easy, building enough links to bypass the sandbox and doing the linking structure required is a little harder (and more time consuming).

[roksolana]

I am ready to belive the sandbox exists if my site will not be ranked this Google PR update. I gather some amount of backlinks and SERP for some keywords is up to #1

[solidghost]

I am not too sure about that. But one of my sites didn't rank well in the beginning. In fact, it wasn't in the top 20 pages or so for a competitive keyphrase. Suddenly, out of the blue, it appeared, number 1.

But my next site didn't have that problem. It crawled slowly up.

So, who knows what game is Google playing.....

[Darksat]

I have got a fair idea. 
Will be posting a couple of articles soon.

[solidghost]

Nice man. Looking forward to it.

[Darksat]

Only question is do I put it in black hat SEO or the regular section.