Is your site relatively new? Have you applied all of the best SEO advice you can find, but you're still not ranking? Do you think you may have done something wrong? It might not be anything you've done; it might be the Google sandbox. Keep reading to find out what it is, and how to get out of it.
The Google sandbox or "sandbox effect" is a filter that Google applies to new websites that want to rank in the search results for specific phrases. The filter exists to prevent SEOs and spammers from easily manipulating search results by satisfying all of Google's major offsite and onsite factors.
Signs of the sandbox include:
The website is outranked for clearly navigational queries (the name of the website with exclusion of www. and .com, for example "seochat").
Pages do not rank for exact title matches.
The website ranks well for competitive queries and then drops into no man's land to page 100+ of the SERPs, or does not show for targeted keywords at all.
Site ranks well in Yahoo/Live, but not Google.
There is an important difference between the sandbox and deletion from Google's search results. While the sandbox and a Google ban can seem to be very similar, they are not. The sandbox is a filter (or so SEOs say) used by Google to prevent new websites from taking top spots on search results, while a Google ban is a complete exclusion of the website from the search results. To find out whether your website was banned or was placed in the sandbox, simply search using the following command:
site:www.yourwebsite.com
If Google shows pages from your website, it means you were sandboxed.
If you get the following message: "Your search - site:www.yourwebsite.com - did not match any documents." - then you're banned. If you've been banned, contact Google with an inclusion request, but make sure to clear out all the elements that might have caused you to get banned first.
