The Google Sandbox Effect Quantified
The Google Sandbox Effect, which is the phenomenon of a new and rising site suddenly being cut out of Google’s indices, is not a myth. It’s real, and can happen to your site.
If you look at the following graph, you’ll notice strong upward traffic trends until a certain arbitrary threshold was reached, the decision to sandbox my site made, and thereafter traffic (from Google) dropped off as the sandbox command propogated to all their search servers.
There seem to be three criteria for sandboxing at play here:
1) Your site must be above a certain traffic threshold to eliminate flagging tiny sites. I’m guessing that it’s about 10,000 hits over 7 days. If your site is not sustaining this kind of traffic, the sandbox algorithm won’t even consider it.
2) Your site must have a huge change in the number of documents on site. This site was a script which generated 1.17 million dynamic pages before it achieved popularity. I converted it to a blog with a few thousand pages, a reduction by a factor of -585. I suspect that this penalty applies to increases or decreases in the number of hosted pages.
3) Your site must be rising in popularity at a sufficiently high slope. There is no reason to penalize a site which grows slowly over years, because it cannot be a high-risk startup spam site.
If you want more good Google Sandbox analysis, there’s no better place to look than the SEOMox article 2005 Analysis of Google’s Sandbox. Even though it says “2005″ it’s not at all dated.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 4th, 2006 at 9:46 pm and is tagged with search servers, traffic trends, google, high risk, decreases, threshold, slope, algorithm, myth, phenomenon, graph, popularity, blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.
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