Does Google Sandbox Really Exist
There are some outdated articles and YouTube videos online about Google penalty and how to fix it. None of them are relevant today. In Google webmaster forums many users asked and are asking how to get their websites out of Google Sandbox. All they get is spammy links from other SEO companies whose employees are there to distribute their own links for better rankings or rude comments which starts with intimidating laughs and stupid statements saying:” Google Sandbox is a myth”, “Google Sandbox is created by SEOs” etc. Google’s employees just copy and paste a cliche statement if they see a person has posted on a wrong thread just the way Facebook does in their forums.So real Googlers don’t contribute on these forums. Bunch of wrong solutions and speculations.
You get a respond from a user who does not understand search engine algorithm. They are either employees at SEO book, search engine land, Moz or blackhat SEO forum and the other so called “SEO experts” are just speculating.Website owners who don’t understand why their keywords got penalized just scratching their heads and move on to the other forums to find answer to their problems. Do they really find out what is wrong with their websites? No. Because the answers they get come from those with less knowledge in search engine programming. They play with words and rehash what stands on SEO experts’ articles and paste on those threads.
When a user wants to know how he or she can get their websites out of Google penalty as some say “Sandbox”, they expect to see some relevant solutions and information from Google employees, not bunch of brags about companies and rehashed articles.Where are Google employees? Why are they hiding in those forums and not engaging with users’ needs and questions? Those so called top rated contributors on Google forums are users too. We don’t know their level of experience, expertise and knowledge in search engine algorithm and programming. These are not reliable sources of information. Bunch of rubbish tips from 22-+ years old men and women. They spend their whole time on these forums just to add comments to get a better status as contributors. They should go to college and actually learn the skill instead of trolling and giving nonsense tips to well established but naive business owners.
I had to make some phone calls and find some key employees at Google in order to get an answer to my question and research on Google Sandbox.
When users want to find an answer on Wikipedia, they see bunch of manipulated and injected links in the name of “references” which not only confuses targeted users, but also give them wrong information.
SEO experts don’t speculate on Google sandbox issue. We have been dealing with it since 2012. Why would we discuss on an issue if it didn’t exist? These so called “wise guys” may say for making money. Why would we do that? We find the penalization issue and solve the problem. Anyway!
When Google Sandbox Term started and why?
Google is a program which indexes millions of pages every day. Since 2004 their engineers decided to penalize some keywords for a fixed period of time. This is why they have been penalizing websites for various reasons. Like I said in one of my articles about ( how to supercharge your digital marketing) , search engines’ mantra is to highlight “integrity,” “relevance” and “objectivity”. Google do not care if you are not top ranked for your keywords and phrases.
When Google penalizes some websites, they will not appear for their keywords and phrases in organic search results for duration of between 6 to 12 months. Sometimes the entire domain will be banned. Did you know Twitter has also a sandbox function going on in 2017? It is called Shadowban, Jack Dorsey denies it, but it’s true. They shadowban a user’s account for a fixed period of time or forever. 99% of shadowbanning is handled by Twitter A.I algorithm. So many good accounts get shadowbanned too. Why? Bad programming if you ask me.
Why websites ‘ keywords get disappeared from Google Search Results?
There are four types of sites which get penalized:
A) Websites which get ranked high in Google’s first page search results for a period of maximum two years, but do not get much traffic. Yes you can get a website ranked for a term in Google and not get some good traffic. Unless Google’s traffic algorithm is triggered in such case you get good traffic. How to trigger it, I will explain in another article.
B) Many website owners point huge back links to their main page in a short period of time and then stop building links.They usually do not build back links for their inner pages which is called deep linking.They just focus on their main page. Big mistake!
C) New websites: they start with a lot of activities upon creation, then they stop everything. As a result they get disappeared. These are small businesses who pay to some SEO agencies to do seo, then don’t see sales and stop seoing their sites. Remember! SEO increases the probability of sales. So if you want to use SEO to land a quick sell, then use PPC. Because SEO gives you a long term result not short term like Google Adwords PPC.
D) Reverse sandbox effect: these types of websites get ranked on top for a short period of time, then get removed and as a result get penalized. Usually new book releases and press releases are some examples of such pages.
Every two or three years a series of pages in every niche get top ranked in Google’s first page. They won’t stay there forever. This is how Google Algorithm is designed. (Read my article about Google RankBrain to understand why search engine programmers penalize a keyword. )
The reasons are as follows:
– Great content marketing
– Excellent on page and off page search engine optimization ( SEO)
– Social media marketing
– Pay Per Click advertisement
– User engagement in their own forums and networks
– Email marketing
These well performed websites are aligned with Google’s algorithm updates. Thanks to their expert search engine optimizers.
How to recover your website from penalty?
There are various strategies:
1) If your entire domain is penalized, test the domain for duration of three months and see the effect. This solution is for those who spent a few thousands of dollars on their ecommerce development and don’t want to change their user interface. Based on my experience it will take a couple of thousand dollars to recover the entire domain from penalty issue. Follow the following steps:
– Remove spammy links and disavow them. ( It will take up to 8 months depending on your country and the consultant at Google spam team who has your case on his desk.) These employees get a lot of cases on their desks, this is why it takes several months to get those spammy links disavowed. The disavow link process is not automated. The main disavow links tool has some issues.
– Change the content of the pages and add a well optimized user friendly fresh content. Google must see that you are improving the pages.
– Change your content management system (CMS). The algorithm within your CMS system could be one of the reasons that got your site disappeared from first page search result. It could be a conflict between the algorithm within your CMS and Google algorithm.
– Build quality back links for all your pages slowly.
– Do social media marketing: it works like a charm if it is done right.
– Apply PPC. Today Google Adwords algorithm and Google organic search algorithm work together. If you run PPC for your page, it will perform well in organic search results too. Why? Google put in their algorithm targeted traffic and user engagement commend. If targeted users click at your site, google sends you some love. This is why PPC and SEO work together.
There is 95.5% probability that this will fix your Ecommerce’s penalty issue. Why not 100%? Because every website has a different issue. Some use shared IP, some have coding issues, some use too much backs links for their keywords and so on. Some other ‘s money keywords have higher ratio which penalize their site on keyword level.
2) What to do if Google has penalized some of your money keywords and phrases? Here is my tried and true solution:
A) Change the user interface of that page.
B) Apply on page link wheel seo tactic. Give unique keyword or key phrase to each page under your domain, then do the on page link wheel seo.
C) Build high quality back links, a mix of them. Build those links slowly for duration of between 6 to 12 months.
D) If you do not have a blog, create a blog under your domain and write quality articles related to your niche.
Let users engage with your content. If you don’t have time to handle comments on your own website, then promote your content on social media.
E) Social media marketing.
I applied these solutions and strategies to help my clients. If your plan A didn’t work, the alphabet has 25 more letters! Whatever you do, analyse the website and find out why it is penalized, test some of these solutions and give it some time to see the effect.
Does Google Sandbox really exist?
I conducted a lot of research online and after contacting some Google search engine employees via phone I found out that google sandbox does not exist anymore. Google used to sandbox new websites temporary between years 2004 and 2015, but they have altered their algorithm once again at the end of 2016. If your website does not appear in Google search results for your keywords or phrases, there are some other issues. Let me diagnose your website and tell you what can be wrong.