There are many forums and blogs talking about the “sandbox” theory, which states that when your website is new, Google places it in a “sandbox” for a certain time. During that time, you do not appear high in the rankings and you might not even appear at all.
Some people say building more links to your website will enable you to “escape” from the sandbox. Others say the sandbox effect can only be eliminated by the passage of time. A lot of people however believe that the sandbox mechanism in Google actually exists.
Let us first understand that there are many aspects of SEO, internet marketing and website management which can be argued both ways. The sandbox theory is one of them. No one knows whether is exists for sure, but people are able to validate it (or invalidate it) based on their experiences.
My experience tells me that if I carry out link building in the right way, I can appear on page one for moderately competitive keywords in week 3-4. As soon as I start a website, my practices enable me to get it indexed within the next 5-6 hours. And typically in the first week, I am somewhere on pages 5-6 of the search results.
Does that mean that the “sandbox” theory is untrue? In my experience it is.
I feel that people think the sandbox exists for two reasons. The first group of people does not know how to get backlinks to their websites at all and therefore get anxious when their website does not show in Google index for a certain period of time. The latter group simply gets so many unnatural, low quality links to their website in the first week of inception that Google penalizes them.
Therefore, I believe that although the sandbox mechanism does not exist, Google can keep your website from appearing high in the rankings (or at all) because of your lack of good SEO knowledge.
The correct way to making sure your website is never sandboxed is to build a steady amount of good quality links to it consistently.
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