Website Design Tips - Hypergurl

Google Legends - Myth or Fact?

If you’ve been around any SEO message forums lately you would have come across a couple of Google terms including sandbox and + or -30 penalties and wondered what exactly they are referring to.

Google Sandbox

Google sandbox is a term used by many webmasters to help explain why new domains take longer to be listed on Google than on other search engines like Yahoo or MSN. Some argue that it seems as if Google places them into a sandbox to go and play on their own until they have proven themselves worthy of being listed. It’s not uncommon for frustrated webmasters to notice a delay of 90 – 120 days before being listed on the search engine. It’s my guess that this may be the time taken to receive a decent page rank. Page rank systems are used by Google to determine if pages are important. They are also used to analyze what queries the website should be listed for.

Explanation of page rank taken from http://www.google.com/technology/index.html

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query.

Whether the sandbox effect actually exists is highly disputed through out message forums and Google themselves have never admitted to it. In any case, 120 days is a relatively short time in the larger scheme of things when you consider how long you’re intending to have your website running.

- + Penalty (Some call it -30 penalty, others call it +30 penalty)

I like to call it -30 penalty as I see it as being taken down thirty notches within Google search engine. There is a lot of discussion going on about this in message forums, where webmasters have noticed website pages being downgraded in Google search to page 4 (#31 listing and onwards). Some have come to the conclusion that Google penalizes sites that use link spamming, JavaScript redirects or doorway pages to name a few.

Link spamming techniques include overly posting your web site URL to guestbooks, message forums or blogs in the hope of improving your Google PageRank. The truth is, there is no need to do this solely for PageRank reasons. Over time, visitors will naturally find your site and if they like it, they will give you honest links back.

As far as redirects and doorway pages go, there is a lot of truth to this. Google doesn’t like them. Matt Cutts, head of Google WebSpam team specifically refers to these techniques in his latest blog post: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/undetectable-spam/ .

The good news is, it seems you can recover from a - + penalty by removing all spamming techniques and waiting time for Google to pick up the changes and re-list you as normal.