Google sandbox in 2023?

domainmadness

domainmadness

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I purchased EMD domain/site few years ago for big money keyword. I didn't have time to develop the site until this spring. It used to have quite low quality affiliate site and basically no rankings. I created a service based website similar I've done in the past and ranked quite well.

New site was launched end of April 2023 and still there's basically no rankings at all in Google. I've built high quality, extremely relevant links from my own network which have ranked sites in the past. No penalties that can be seen in Search Console. I've added manually written, high quality content steadily - not huge amount as it's not typical for a site like this in this niche, but still dozens.

I just checked and the site is ranking #1 in Bing for it's EMD, over huge sites (big financial institutions). I know Bing is in love of EMD's, but still - why there's no rankings in Google baffles me. EMD keyword is ranking on/off on 90's and even best keywords are somewhere in 30's - even those should be relatively easy to rank in top10-20, heck there's not even targeted queries for some terms more than that.

Is this some kind of sandbox or what you think might be going on?
 
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You're not ranking for anything? Even new sites show up in SERP's, not on first page perhaps but you will have impressions and a clicks now and again. 'Sandbox' doesn't take you completely out of SERPs.

If you have no rankings at all, sounds like Google has penalized the site somehow.
 
Maybe you bought a penalised website?....nowdays you have to check a lot of shit when buying a domain....if it's to good to be true stay away.
 
blogmarketer said:
You're not ranking for anything? Even new sites show up in SERP's, not on first page perhaps but you will have impressions and a clicks now and again. 'Sandbox' doesn't take you completely out of SERPs.

If you have no rankings at all, sounds like Google has penalized the site somehow.
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As I wrote in the OP, some terms are ranking in 20-30 spots, so there's "some" rankings - wouldn't really call these rankings though since these are low volume/low comp keywords.

laur.laurix said:
Maybe you bought a penalised website?....nowdays you have to check a lot of shit when buying a domain....if it's to good to be true stay away.
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I very much doubt it was penalized since there was not much links to it and what there were are mostly organic links and/or highly related links. It was just an old site which wasn't high quality and not updated in long time, hence not really ranking for anything when I bought it.

If penalty was content related, wouldn't it get lifted if the whole site got updated/changed to something completely else (from affiliate site to real business offering services).

Any tips to first test if the domain has penalty (again, I really don't think so, it's very clean). Will have to think the ways to lift the penalty if there's one, but first have to determine if the penalty exists. As said, search console doesn't show any.
 
domainmadness said:
As I wrote in the OP, some terms are ranking in 20-30 spots, so there's "some" rankings - wouldn't really call these rankings though since these are low volume/low comp keywords.


I very much doubt it was penalized since there was not much links to it and what there were are mostly organic links and/or highly related links. It was just an old site which wasn't high quality and not updated in long time, hence not really ranking for anything when I bought it.

If penalty was content related, wouldn't it get lifted if the whole site got updated/changed to something completely else (from affiliate site to real business offering services).

Any tips to first test if the domain has penalty (again, I really don't think so, it's very clean). Will have to think the ways to lift the penalty if there's one, but first have to determine if the penalty exists. As said, search console doesn't show any.
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Have you ever heard about a toxic PBN?.....links you can't see that are only discoverable if you know what you are doing?
 
laur.laurix said:
Have you ever heard about a toxic PBN?.....links you can't see that are only discoverable if you know what you are doing?
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Yes I have and I'm 100% sure that's not the case here. And those would be found from search console anyway - if not, then Google wouldn't count them either.
 
laur.laurix said:
Lol false.
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How's so? How to check them then?

Anyway, even if I'm wrong regarding what Google shows in search console, I very much doubt the links are the issue here for this site. It's non-english site and it's not typical in my language to find any spammed domains since nobody (at least used to) do that in the past.

If it would be link penalty, how would you check and confirm it?
 
what is sanbox please guide to new people, also guide new people that how to work here ,,,,,,
 
hk dogar said:
what is sanbox please guide to new people, also guide new people that how to work here ,,,,,,
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The Google Sandbox is like a waiting room for new websites. When you create a new site, Google might make it wait there for a while before letting it appear in search results. This is to check if your site is legit and not trying to trick the system. It's like a security measure for new websites. Once Google trusts your site, it will let it show up in search results like other established websites.
 
All my last projects are on Sandbox i believe ... the first 2/3 weeks, it got good impressions/rank on Google. After that, it dropped to 0 impressions... my last project, if I search for the full title of any post on Google, is nowhere to be found, but Google indexes the pages, so I started to believe with content 100% Human score written and plagiarism 0% on all posts, all new websites will be added to the sandbox ...
All my websites if I check inside sitemap_index.xml on Google Webmaster Tools, are empty, but on start, I can see all other sitemaps.
So I think 95% of sites enter from the start on sandbox ... now I'm testing a new strategy and hope i can pass the sandbox on start, but till now, all 6 have the same results. (The last one still has like 20/40 Impressions per day from 5,000 impressions per day in the first 2 weeks.)
 
zocx said:
All my last projects are on Sandbox i believe ... the first 2/3 weeks, it got good impressions/rank on Google. After that, it dropped to 0 impressions... my last project, if I search for the full title of any post on Google, is nowhere to be found, but Google indexes the pages, so I started to believe with content 100% Human score written and plagiarism 0% on all posts, all new websites will be added to the sandbox ...
All my websites if I check inside sitemap_index.xml on Google Webmaster Tools, are empty, but on start, I can see all other sitemaps.
So I think 95% of sites enter from the start on sandbox ... now I'm testing a new strategy and hope i can pass the sandbox on start, but till now, all 6 have the same results. (The last one still has like 20/40 Impressions per day from 5,000 impressions per day in the first 2 weeks.)
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My site is service based (not a blog or affiliate site) and has high quality human written content, custom made images etc.

I think the issue could be that it used to be abandoned blog site and I kind of feel I should have first deindexed the old site and only then published the new. Now I owned the domain and it was live with the abandoned blog like 3 years and then just pushed the new site live and indexed it via Search Console. All the pages are getting indexed fast, but the rankings are all +30, most even lower or out of top 100. Some are with low competition and I'm familiar in this niche, the site should normally be ranking already better.

It's just been 4 months soon, would have expected to be out of sandbox by now, I see some saying it could take 6 to 9 months even. Any experience of this long sandboxes?
 
hk dogar said:
what is sanbox please guide to new people, also guide new people that how to work here ,,,,,,
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It's a phase where your site is "filtered" from the normal positions it "belongs" without the sandbox.

Google officially says there's no sandbox, but SEO's have a lot of experience of something that definitely feels like sandbox. It might not happen always and the length of it varies, but sometimes, for some reason, your site won't rank much for anything (like out of Top30) no matter what you do - and then suddenly this "filter" is lifted and your pages start ranking as you would expect them. It doesn't mean you'll jump up to first page then, but at least you'll get a "fair chance" against other sites.
 
zocx said:
All my last projects are on Sandbox i believe ... the first 2/3 weeks, it got good impressions/rank on Google. After that, it dropped to 0 impressions... my last project, if I search for the full title of any post on Google, is nowhere to be found, but Google indexes the pages, so I started to believe with content 100% Human score written and plagiarism 0% on all posts, all new websites will be added to the sandbox ...
All my websites if I check inside sitemap_index.xml on Google Webmaster Tools, are empty, but on start, I can see all other sitemaps.
So I think 95% of sites enter from the start on sandbox ... now I'm testing a new strategy and hope i can pass the sandbox on start, but till now, all 6 have the same results. (The last one still has like 20/40 Impressions per day from 5,000 impressions per day in the first 2 weeks.)
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How many posts per day do post.
 
Its not any kind of sandbox.
EMD doesnt work.
EMD with strong brand reputation works.
 
Dgriffindors said:
How many posts per day do post.
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As I said, it's service based site so there's not ton of articles, but all are high quality, human written with 2000+ words. There's little bit less than 100 posts now. Main competitors have between 200-500 posts.
 
MichaelMelissaTT said:
Hey domainmadness,

Your situation definitely sounds puzzling, especially considering you've had success with similar ventures in the past. Here are some thoughts on what could be happening:

  1. Google Sandbox: Yes, the Google Sandbox effect could be at play here, especially since the domain seems to have had a history of low-quality content. The sandbox effect can last from a few months up to a year. It’s essentially a filter Google puts on new websites to prevent them from ranking well.
  2. Algorithmic Differences: Bing and Google have different ranking algorithms. Just because you're doing well on Bing doesn't mean the same will happen on Google.
  3. Backlinks: Are the backlinks you've built recently indexed yet? Sometimes it takes time for Google to recognize and reward new backlinks.
  4. EMD (Exact Match Domain): Google’s EMD algorithm update could be affecting your rankings if the search engine interprets your domain as an attempt to rank based solely on the keywords in the domain name.
  5. On-page SEO: Even though you mentioned the content is high quality, have you also optimized other on-page elements like Meta descriptions, H1s, and image alt texts?
  6. Content Depth: While you’ve added dozens of high-quality articles, sometimes Google values more in-depth content for certain niches.
  7. User Signals: Have you checked Analytics for user behavior? High bounce rates and low time-on-site can negatively affect your rankings.
  8. Penalties: You mentioned no penalties in the Search Console, which is good, but it might be worth going through the manual actions just in case.
  9. Mobile Usability: Make sure your site is mobile-friendly since Google uses mobile-first indexing.
  10. Canonical Tags: Ensure there are no incorrect canonical tags that might be confusing Google’s crawlers.
Since you're already monitoring Google Search Console, continue to do so for any crawl errors or notices. Also, consider getting a second set of eyes to do an SEO audit of your site; sometimes we miss small things that can make a big difference.

Hope this helps give some direction to your investigation. Good luck!
Click to expand...
Thanks GPT!
 
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