Someone Explains me What is Google Sandbox please!

[seojen]

I need your advice guys, I have this website created in the first days of April and today I checked it in Ahrefs and found it was showing some keywords there as seen in the screenshot.
I've been reading things about new websites and how it normally takes something around 6 months to get out of the sandbox and how it's not a good idea to build links for such new sites and I wonder whether I should start getting links to help rank the keywords that are alrady showing off in Google or I should wait another couple of months?

 

[tazarbm]

Sandbox means that you can do whatever you want to your site, ie. publish content like crazy, build links, remove / edit the content, drive real traffic to your site, have great products and services that make billions of people buying them everyday, etc... you can do any, or all of these things and literally have the best, most useful, and most important site in the entire Universe and google won't give shit about it. They'll refuse to rank it during the first months / years of its existence. Why do they refuse to index such a gem of a site? Nobody knows (except for google, obviously). But the point is that they put your site in a sandbox where you can play with it without affecting anything. That's the sandbox...

Also, the thing with 6 months that you mentioned is the norm / average, but it's not always 6 months. Some sites stay in the sandbox for 1-3 months, others for 1-2 years or more... You can't know this until you start ranking all of a sudden without knowing why. This has happened to 2 of my sites back in 2020. I purchased 2 sites in September 2020 and did nothing to them because I was busy with other projects.

I just added both sites to my GSC and then let them sit there (and they were bad sites, too by the way, each one having only 10 articles of 400-500 words that were badly written... even the site design was bad)... so anyway, I added those 2 sites to my GSC like I said, and then I forgot about them until last year when I noticed they started getting impressions in GSC on the same day of the same month.

So, 9 months later they have both started getting daily impressions, those bad looking sites (2 different niches, by the way) with gibberish content that nobody cared about for 9 months all of a sudden showed up in google's index on the same day of the same month, huh? Pretty big coincidence if you asked me ... But it wasn't coincidence, it was just the sandbox....

EDIT: if your site is indexed and at least getting impressions you can start building links... well, to the indexed pages anyway, otherwise it looks suspicious to google that people link to pages that don't exist (in their index)

 

[HustleTong]

In a nutshell, the sandbox period varies across several niches
Depending on the topics you wish to rank for, this could stretch up to a year
Some people use aged domains to mitigate this effect but it's inevitable

 

[seojen]

Sandbox means that you can do whatever you want to your site, ie. publish content like crazy, build links, remove / edit the content, drive real traffic to your site, have great products and services that make billions of people buying them everyday, etc... you can do any, or all of these things and literally have the best, most useful, and most important site in the entire Universe and google won't give shit about it. They'll refuse to rank it during the first months / years of its existence. Why do they refuse to index such a gem of a site? Nobody knows (except for google, obviously). But the point is that they put your site in a sandbox where you can play with it without affecting anything. That's the sandbox...

Also, the thing with 6 months that you mentioned is the norm / average, but it's not always 6 months. Some sites stay in the sandbox for 1-3 months, others for 1-2 years or more... You can't know this until you start ranking all of a sudden without knowing why. This has happened to 2 of my sites back in 2020. I purchased 2 sites in September 2020 and did nothing to them because I was busy with other projects.

I just added both sites to my GSC and then let them sit there (and they were bad sites, too by the way, each one having only 10 articles of 400-500 words that were badly written... even the site design was bad)... so anyway, I added those 2 sites to my GSC like I said, and then I forgot about them until last year when I noticed they started getting impressions in GSC on the same day of the same month.

So, 9 months later they have both started getting daily impressions, those bad looking sites (2 different niches, by the way) with gibberish content that nobody cared about for 9 months all of a sudden showed up in google's index on the same day of the same month, huh? Pretty big coincidence if you asked me ... But it wasn't coincidence, it was just the sandbox....

EDIT: if your site is indexed and at least getting impressions you can start building links... well, to the indexed pages anyway, otherwise it looks suspicious to google that people link to pages that don't exist (in their index)

Thank you very much for this detailed input, my site has 29 posts by now but only 8 are indexed, so I guess I can start building links to those ones.

 

[seojen]

In a nutshell, the sandbox period varies across several niches
Depending on the topics you wish to rank for, this could stretch up to a year
Some people use aged domains to mitigate this effect but it's inevitable

My site is in the finance niche on a newly registerd domain.

 

[Accountstealth]

Basically a myth

 

[blackbeans]

Google Sandbox is a process where Google doesn't rank your content high enough for it to get significant traffic.

It's kind of a holding period for new websites and new content.

But as your website begins to rank pages with easier-to-rank keywords, your domain authority starts to go up.

When that happens, you will get even more traffic from Google.

It takes some time.

But the good news is if you are building websites, the more posts you have, the higher the chance you will bounce out of Google's Sandbox sooner rather than later.

Of course, these must be quality posts.

I'm talking about content that targets lower-difficulty keywords and delivers on the search intent behind such keywords.

You have to think in terms of production timelines.

Build a blog that has 150 posts.

Once that is up, build another blog on another niche with the same amount of posts.

By the time you get to your third blog, your first blog should be pulling in traffic.

At that point, you can then increase the overall quality of the content by tightening up formatting to increase engagement.

You can also start monetization by adding AdSense or other affiliate display programs or even selling your own products.

I suggest that if you are targetting long-tail keywords to sell your own products because the return on investment is much higher using that approach.

 

[seojen]

Google Sandbox is a process where Google doesn't rank your content high enough for it to get significant traffic.

It's kind of a holding period for new websites and new content.

But as your website begins to rank pages with easier-to-rank keywords, your domain authority starts to go up.

When that happens, you will get even more traffic from Google.

It takes some time.

But the good news is if you are building websites, the more posts you have, the higher the chance you will bounce out of Google's Sandbox sooner rather than later.

Of course, these must be quality posts.

I'm talking about content that targets lower-difficulty keywords and delivers on the search intent behind such keywords.

You have to think in terms of production timelines.

Build a blog that has 150 posts.

Once that is up, build another blog on another niche with the same amount of posts.

By the time you get to your third blog, your first blog should be pulling in traffic.

At that point, you can then increase the overall quality of the content by tightening up formatting to increase engagement.

You can also start monetization by adding AdSense or other affiliate display programs or even selling your own products.

I suggest that if you are targetting long-tail keywords to sell your own products because the return on investment is much higher using that approach.

I love this input, thank you @ blackbeans.

 

[davidelzs]

The Google Sandbox refers to an alleged filter that prevents new websites from ranking in Google's top results.

 

[Logann]

Sandbox means that you can do whatever you want to your site, ie. publish content like crazy, build links, remove / edit the content, drive real traffic to your site, have great products and services that make billions of people buying them everyday, etc... you can do any, or all of these things and literally have the best, most useful, and most important site in the entire Universe and google won't give shit about it. They'll refuse to rank it during the first months / years of its existence. Why do they refuse to index such a gem of a site? Nobody knows (except for google, obviously). But the point is that they put your site in a sandbox where you can play with it without affecting anything. That's the sandbox...

Also, the thing with 6 months that you mentioned is the norm / average, but it's not always 6 months. Some sites stay in the sandbox for 1-3 months, others for 1-2 years or more... You can't know this until you start ranking all of a sudden without knowing why. This has happened to 2 of my sites back in 2020. I purchased 2 sites in September 2020 and did nothing to them because I was busy with other projects.

I just added both sites to my GSC and then let them sit there (and they were bad sites, too by the way, each one having only 10 articles of 400-500 words that were badly written... even the site design was bad)... so anyway, I added those 2 sites to my GSC like I said, and then I forgot about them until last year when I noticed they started getting impressions in GSC on the same day of the same month.

So, 9 months later they have both started getting daily impressions, those bad looking sites (2 different niches, by the way) with gibberish content that nobody cared about for 9 months all of a sudden showed up in google's index on the same day of the same month, huh? Pretty big coincidence if you asked me ... But it wasn't coincidence, it was just the sandbox....

EDIT: if your site is indexed and at least getting impressions you can start building links... well, to the indexed pages anyway, otherwise it looks suspicious to google that people link to pages that don't exist (in their index)

Hello,
My site is indexed in Google Search Console, and the product URLs on my site are indexed by Google Search Console the next day. In this case, can I create some links?

 

[88interactive]

I need your advice guys, I have this website created in the first days of April and today I checked it in Ahrefs and found it was showing some keywords there as seen in the screenshot.
I've been reading things about new websites and how it normally takes something around 6 months to get out of the sandbox and how it's not a good idea to build links for such new sites and I wonder whether I should start getting links to help rank the keywords that are alrady showing off in Google or I should wait another couple of months?
View attachment 211091

When your site is put into the Google Sandbox, your site is still indexed and crawled, but you will be set aside when it comes to actual Google searches. Until you make it out of the Sandbox, you won't show up in Google's search results.

 

[tazarbm]

Hello,
My site is indexed in Google Search Console, and the product URLs on my site are indexed by Google Search Console the next day. In this case, can I create some links?

of course! Just don't blast your site with 100s of links if it doesn't have any links yet, and also be mindful of the anchor texts (use branded, generic and / or naked URLs most of the time, only 2-3% of your anchors should be exact match keywords)

 

[Logann]

of course! Just don't blast your site with 100s of links if it doesn't have any links yet, and also be mindful of the anchor texts (use branded, generic and / or naked URLs most of the time, only 2-3% of your anchors should be exact match keywords)

Thanks for your reminder. Can I modify the titles and URLs of products on my website? (My ecommerce site has 100 products)

 

[xReminisce]

Thanks for your reminder. Can I modify the titles and URLs of products on my website? (My ecommerce site has 100 products)

Modifying title is OK, but if you are modifying the URLs, you may loose link juice (if anything was linked/interlinked towards it)
Also, if you are not 301ing the old to new URLs, it will show up as 301 errors and eventually if indexed, SE's will remove it.
Also... as with all 301 redirects, there is always a chance for it to drop in rankings too.

 

[Logann]

Modifying title is OK, but if you are modifying the URLs, you may loose link juice (if anything was linked/interlinked towards it)
Also, if you are not 301ing the old to new URLs, it will show up as 301 errors and eventually if indexed, SE's will remove it.
Also... as with all 301 redirects, there is always a chance for it to drop in rankings too.

Thank you for your reply.
The product URL I modified does not yet have any external links, and that is what I am going to do next.

 

[tazarbm]

Thanks for your reminder. Can I modify the titles and URLs of products on my website? (My ecommerce site has 100 products)

changing the URLs of pages that rank is a bad idea because you may lose the rankings. But if you don't rank, no problem, you can change them.

And yeah, titles can be changed as well

 

[Logann]

changing the URLs of pages that rank is a bad idea because you may lose the rankings. But if you don't rank, no problem, you can change them.

And yeah, titles can be changed as well

My shopify ecommerce site has 140 products, can I delete 40 products? They are not yet ranked.

Will I be penalized by Google for this?

 

[tazarbm]

My shopify ecommerce site has 140 products, can I delete 40 products? They are not yet ranked.

Will I be penalized by Google for this?

google doesn't penalize you for deleting / adding content to your site. The only problem might be if the URLs of those products are indexed in google. If they're indexed and you delete them the next time google lands on those URLs it will find 404 pages and that's not good for your site's SEO.

So, if the URLs of those products are indexed make sure to 301-redirect them to similar products, or to the homepage of your site, or to the same categories that those products belonged to, or wherever else makes sense.

Or, if you don't want to mess around with 301s, use custom 404 pages to tell visitors who might land on the discontinued product's URLs to visit the new locations of those products / the locations of similar products as the ones they're looking for are out of stock / production / whatever.

 

[Logann]

google doesn't penalize you for deleting / adding content to your site. The only problem might be if the URLs of those products are indexed in google. If they're indexed and you delete them the next time google lands on those URLs it will find 404 pages and that's not good for your site's SEO.

So, if the URLs of those products are indexed make sure to 301-redirect them to similar products, or to the homepage of your site, or to the same categories that those products belonged to, or wherever else makes sense.

Or, if you don't want to mess around with 301s, use custom 404 pages to tell visitors who might land on the discontinued product's URLs to visit the new locations of those products / the locations of similar products as the ones they're looking for are out of stock / production / whatever.

Thanks for the reply. Comprehensive and detailed answers.

 

[Logann]

google doesn't penalize you for deleting / adding content to your site. The only problem might be if the URLs of those products are indexed in google. If they're indexed and you delete them the next time google lands on those URLs it will find 404 pages and that's not good for your site's SEO.

So, if the URLs of those products are indexed make sure to 301-redirect them to similar products, or to the homepage of your site, or to the same categories that those products belonged to, or wherever else makes sense.

Or, if you don't want to mess around with 301s, use custom 404 pages to tell visitors who might land on the discontinued product's URLs to visit the new locations of those products / the locations of similar products as the ones they're looking for are out of stock / production / whatever.

Sorry to bother you one last time.

My product urls have been indexed by google search console. None of my website products currently have visitors. So can I 404 them both? What is bad for my website seo?