How long does google sandbox

No matter what you do and how hard you try, there is no way you can improve your rankings while your website is trapped in the mouth of this voracious monster. Even though the search engine representatives deny its existence, new websites fail to rank high in SERP. And the probable cause of this is Google Sandbox. Some experts think the search engine needs time to check if a website is spammy or not. Others believe it takes a while for Google to understand what a website is about and collect the information needed to rank it.

Yet, no one can tell how long Google Sandbox lasts. The only thing that matters is that the sandbox period is a pain in the neck for anyone who wants to rank high without having to wait for months. The sandbox effect became well-known back in At that time, SEOs first noticed that it was impossible to rank new websites high.

What also drew their attention was the fact that it was happening with Google Search only. Bing and Yahoo ranked new websites high from the very beginning. More than 16 years have passed, but nothing has changed since. Google still puts new websites to Sandbox and keeps them there for several months.

There are no Google Sandbox checker tools. However, you can use Analytics to find out if your site was or still is in the sandbox. Look at the screenshot above. The honeymoon is when a new website gets a splash of traffic from Google because the search engine checks how users interact with it.

After that, the site loses its rankings for some time again, and then traffic and rankings start to rise the natural way. It will show you the number of visitors you had on each day of the month.

By analyzing traffic spikes and drops and correlate them with ranking dynamics, you can easily determine whether your website was, or still is, in the Sandbox without switching back and forth between different tools. Our tool will show you where your visitors come from, what browsers they use, what type of devices they open your site on, and other crucial information.

As we discovered, even old domains can get sucked into the quicksands of Google Sandbox. However, that was not entirely correct. Even if you have an aged domain, it can still end up in Google Sandbox in some cases: for example, after a long period of inactivity. If you stop optimizing your website for a while and then continue your SEO efforts, there is a chance you will go straight to the sandbox.

That already happened to some webmasters. As you can see, Katherine has bought a domain that was inactive for about four years. She assumed Google sandboxed her new website. And that was not far from the truth. You see, Google starts treating older sites as new if they have been inactive for too long. That means that even an old site may end up in the sandbox if you decide to redesign it completely. However, all of this is just a theory.

While you decide to believe it or not, we will show you six ways to get out of Google Sandbox. When you have highly relevant articles in the form of a cluster, it makes Google to easily deem you as an expert in the field and rank you high for the keywords. Head over to the spam section of your blog comments.

Edit the comment make it insightful and keyword-rich, weed out of the link and approve it. With this, you get comments from different IPs, keyword benefit, and comments that sound natural. The spammers have done half job for you. It will act as a social proof for the visitors of your site and also helps in increasing conversions. You know it or not, the Google Crawlers have the ability to distinguish the difference between the main content and the comments.

The trick here is instead of using keywords in the article repeatedly, you can be more liberal while using keywords in the comments. Including keywords in the comments section is a way of telling Google that our commenters agree that the content is relevant to the keyword targeted. Link velocity refers to the rate at which you build backlinks to your site. Remember that, rushing hard to build backlinks from day one seems abnormal, Google tends to watch you closely and may extend the sandbox period.

I suggest you start your link building campaigns only once your site starts getting atleast a dozen of organic visits daily. One of the greatest ways by which you can decrease or even skip the Google sandbox is by faking some buzz.

This can be made with the help of press release. Make sure the links in the press release are of nofollow. Because, as I said you earlier, a large amount of links that too dofollow links can harm your site. But the fact is that even nofollow links some times , do pass some SEO juice to your site. Immediately after the press release, maybe after a day or so, pass some social signals to your niche blog.

This is because in order to justify the buzz for your site you need some social shares. It appears the buzz to be natural.

Google is stressing more and more on on-page user interaction. The metrics such as page dwell duration, bounce rate, etc. During the initial days of your blogging site, make sure you work more on reducing bounce rate and increasing the time that visitors spend on your site.

This is crucial for a new site because as the Google sandbox is the incubation period, Google will have a close eye on your site. Make sure you dig the Google Analytics regularly and fix the pages on your site that have poor engagement rate. Maybe you can fix them by interlinking or adding a great introduction it works wonders for increasing dwell time.

Buying sites that are actively getting traffic and are out of the sandbox period is also a great choice. Whenever I start a new site, I tend to look for the sites that are active for a long time but are underoptimized. By paying a couple of hundred dollars or even less, you can easily skip the months of Google Sandbox depending upon your niche.

If you are in a niche like fitness, forex, etc. You can consider doing email outreach for this. Alternatively, you can also go with marketplaces like Flippa or get any ready-made websites that are around for a while.

If you do website flipping , this is crucial for you. Because time is money for you. Although the strategies I presented in the article may not completely get rid of Google Sandbox effect for your site, it alleviates and reduces the time significantly. I would mainly focus on quality content, promotion, social media signals, and a couple of profile backlinks. A great article by you. Lots of information and tactics to bring traffic to your blog. Having quality content always is the key.

I have a doubt though and that is when you write naturally for your blog posts you tend to have very low keyword density as it is happening with me. I do involve target keywords in seo title and all through the texts and also in the sub-headings.

But still, it always shows to be around 0. Really Amazing article Akshay, I literally enjoy reading your blog post. You describe the most important 7 points strategy that helps beginner blog creators in getting out of the sandbox period as soon as possible. I just create a new site, so it also helps me a lot.

Thanks for your tips. Using LSI keywords is a great alternative to the old keyword stuffing practice. Your article is very well written. I like to know more about what is new and i think that we must always learn from each other. The actual search traffic as reported in Google Analytics is usually times bigger. The Google Sandbox has never been officially confirmed by Google. But many SEOs are confident in its existence, as they see sandbox-like effects when trying to rank new websites.

Does the Google Sandbox exist in ? To answer these questions, I reached out to a few SEO practitioners to learn what they think about Google sandbox in , based on their experience with new websites.

Back in , webmasters and SEO professionals noticed that their newly launched websites were not ranking well on Google for the first few months, despite their SEO efforts. New websites were duly indexed by Google, but they did not rank even for relatively low-competition keywords and phrases. But they were ranking well on other search engines, such as Bing and Yahoo.

Keeping in mind that Google wants to serve authoritative and high-quality content to its users and might not trust in brand new websites, that actually made sense. Rand Fishkin, for example, believed that SEOmoz had been sandboxed for 9 months , despite its perfectly natural strong backlink profile. There was even a theory that the Google sandbox was pushing people to spend money on PPC.

In Google sandbox got another wave of interest when site owners and SEOs again saw that their new sites were not ranking as quickly as they used to, on a large scale.

This was mostly discussed on black hat forums and could be the result of another anti-spam filter from Google. In your work, do you feel the impact of the Google Sandbox or whatever looks similar to it on new websites?

But yes, a new site, be it a start-up or a microsite for an established domain, struggles to get visibility until it proves its importance to Google.

If getting out of the sandbox means ranking on the first page, the answer depends on the time put into improving the signals vs the competitiveness of the existing sites.

It could be days, months, or years. You get out what you put in. For these sites, once the algos see that the site exists past 1 year non-dedicated webmasters will not pay for hosting fees past 1 year , results tend to increase. Yes absolutely. The more development one does content, links, content, directories, Search Console, content, social signals, content, local directories, content, local citations, etc. The way search works, new domains have a big disadvantage. New websites are easy to get indexed but hard to rank.

We all need to set our expectations carefully. Holding back brand new websites from ranking could give Google more time to evaluate the website quality and fight spam. A week-old website suddenly breaking into the SERPs for a competitive keyword, beating the pages that have been ranking there for years is suspicious, right?

Besides, we all know that backlinks are one of the most important ranking factors. And it is highly unlikely that pages on a new website will accrue strong backlink profiles within a few weeks. In addition, many SEOs strongly believe that Google considers user behaviour in their ranking algorithms via click-through rates, dwell time , and other metrics, which they can potentially collect and analyze.