Google sandbox

[stencil]

Has anyone heard of the theory that new website rankings are temporarily reduced placing them into what is known as the sandbox. This is news to me.

[jakson0100]

One of the primary reasons for new sites into the sandbox is due to blackhat practices. These include creating duplicate content, keyword stuffing and bulk purchasing of links. All of which optimize a website, but do not create a targeted search.

[MattBarthorp]

Thats right. Google Sandbox phenomenon helps in controlling spammers who create websites and use blackhat techniques for getting ranked high in the search engines result pages. But, a genuine website would gradually keep growing with the passing time but a spammers site would not (ideally), yet stay on top of the SERP's. Hence to give justice to legitimate websites, it is said that the Google Sandbox method was implemented.

[Caboodle]

Does this mean that if the site is real, it should have legit activity and will go back to high rankings? That's good to know. I hate how spammers make it bad for everybody. People are afraid to check out sites, because they think it will be spam.

[Catherine]

Does this mean that if the site is real, it should have legit activity and will go back to high rankings?

Well, this is not necessary, however, most of the times, this has been noticed. The search engine bots crawl the website and determine whether the activities carried out for getting good ranking of the website are genuine enough. If all the activities are found to be legitimate, the website remains in the search engine results or else is dropped by the search engine automatically which finally results into the genuine websites getting good rankings again.

[WeRollin]

How long does a site last in the sandbox usually? I don't think this has ever happened to me, though this may happen when you first open your site up anyway, when you don't even think it'd be at a good PR, right?

[MattBarthorp]

There is no clear information available that would answer your question. But based on assumptions and few trial and error method, your site can stay in Sandbox from anywhere more than 3 months. If you keep building additional pages for your site and follow ethical SEO and promotional techniques, this period can be greatly reduced.