Highly speculative
The article on the Google "sandbox effect" needs a great deal more work on it, and it needs to clarify in detail what the alleged effects are. In it's current form it is highly speculative and offers no evidence to support the theory.
Issues that should be discussed in the article include:
- how can you check if a site is "sandboxed" or not?
- what length of time is the "sandbox effect" believed to last for?
- Is a sandboxed site omitted from the Google for all search results, or is a penalty applied to its ranking?
- why is it that sites alleged to be "in the sandbox" are said to rank well in Google for obscure searches, but not for other search terms?
- what distinguishes search terms that are penalized by the sandbox, and terms that have no penalty?
- does the "sandbox effect" relate to new web domains or to new pages?
- what evidence is there to support the assertion that the "level of search engine optimisation appears not to be a factor"?
This last point is critical, as most discussions I have seen related to the sandbox effect actually relate to a lack of search engine optimisation techniques.
Howard Wright
OK then, how do you determine if a particular site has been "sandboxed" or affected by this sandbox effect? It would help a great deal if all those who have observed effects that they think are due to the Google sandbox could put forward a way of checking if a webpage or website suffers from this effect or not. How do you test this? How do you know if your site has been affected by the sandbox? How do you know the symptoms aren't due to other factors (level of optimisation, possible use of "spammy" techniques etc)
Any thoughts on any/all of the above questions would also be most useful - and if we want to end up with a sensible article, I think these issues must be tackled -- Howard
I think the article needs a much clearer description of exactly what this phenomenon is, and what the symptoms are. Once there are some specifics, it ought to be fairly easy for people to test individual pages to see if they think they have been "sandboxed". How does this sound:
Sandbox symptoms:
- the page has a high Google ranking for some highly-specific searches, for example company name or domain name (where "high" means within the top 100 search results)
- the page has poor Google rankings for most other searches (where "poor" means not showing up in the top 500 search results).
The key question is, how do you distinguish search terms that fall into these two categories? I've had this discussion before, and as soon as you find example of searches where a specific site ranks well (seeming to disprove the sandbox idea), the counter-argument comes that the search term you used "isn't relevant" or "isn't important". How do you tell if a given search phrase is "important" (i.e. will be penalized by the sandbox effect) or not?
Could someone provide some example URLs for pages they believe are currently sandboxed? Having some specifix examples to discuss should help to shed some light on the issue. If necessary, the URL can be entered as plain text, not as a link, to avoid this page itself from influencing the rankings etc.
Howard
Search results from Google.com (31st May) give a number of high rankings for this site:
- "John Holman Sons" - ranked 18th
- "aig europe uk" - ranked 13th
- "gosure insurance" - ranked 9th
Doesn't look like it's sandboxed to me.
Do you have thoughts on which terms a sandboxed site can still be expected to rank well (<100) for? Is it just domain names or company names? I really think some responses to some of the points I first raised above are needed, to give the article a stronger foundation. Even if there are no definitive answers, a summary of what the mainstream views are is, I think, essential - especially on issues such as how to test if a page is sandboxed, how long the sandbox effect is believed to last for, whether the sandbox effect applies by default to all new domains (e.g. not to completely new sites put up on older domains). Howard
I can't help thinking you're avoiding some of the key concerns here. If the above site is sandboxed, why does it get top-20 and top-10 Google rankings for a number of search terms? This looks to be a complete contradiction of what the sandbox effect is claimed to be about! How can these results be explained, if the site really is sandboxed?
Claiming a site is sandboxed on the basis of results for a single search term, when other results directly contradict the claim, looks like very shaky evidence.
As for the other questions, many of these haven't been touched on yet, e.g. how do you test if a site is sandboxed or not (this is fundamental ), and how do you distinguish the search terms that are penalised by the sandbox effect from those (e.g. company or domain names) that aren't? Howard
Also, it looks like the links at the bottom of each page on that site are the likely cause of your problem in Google. The links (multiple links to the same site using different anchor text) look pretty suspicous, and my bet is that Google has (rightly) flagged these as suspicous, just as it probably has on all the partner sites that use the same tactic to link back to the travel insurance site. Most likely, MSN and Yahoo don't yet have algorithms as sophisticated as Google does for picking up this kind of thing, and haven;t penalised the tactic, hence the site still ranks well in these search engines. In my view, Google is quite right to treat these kind of links with suspicion. End result - the sites are penalised in the rankings.
In other words - nothing to do with the sandbox effect or the age of the domain. You can expect the same result for any site using these kind of tactics, regardless of domain or site age.
All too often, it seems there are entirely logical and straight forward reasons why certain sites that claim they are "sandboxed" have poor Google rankings. Spammy or dubious linking etc, and poor search engine optimisation are the usual causes, as in this case. Howard
move from sandbox dab
I'm moving this sentence here from the sandbox dab page. -Quiddity 23:43, 4 June 2006 (UTC)
Not verified
I have added the not verified tag to this article, as apparently recommended by the latest deletion review. As the above discussion makes clear, the facts are disputed, hence for now the disputed tag will remain. Whilst the authors have cited sources, there are a number of problems with these:
- One such source appears to both be referencial back to wikipedia (which is typicially frowned upon) and to also be the personal blog of one of the main authors. Whilst self-citing is allowed, it is undoubtably bad form unless supported by primary sources.
- Although the URL of one of the cited sources seems to give it credence, this alone is not actually enough for it to be considered a primary resource. A lesser known press agency is typically only trusted when they also publish their references, allowing the tracing of information back to it's primary source.
- Similarly to above, most of the articles do not give any reference at all to the sandbox claim.
- The text on most of the references reads identically, leading me to believe that they are infact based off a single common source (which may well be one of the articles alone). One article extends the section on coping with being sandoxed, but this is likely an editorial decision rather than due to a different true source being used.
Unless a stronger, ideally primary, source can be found, I would personally recommend removing this page. This page could be put up for deletion again, or alternatively the speculation merged into the article on google's search technology. The not verified tag should allow sufficient fair time for better sources to be located. LinaMishima 17:35, 17 June 2006 (UTC)
As the issues raised in this discussion have not resulted in any changes to the article, and the evidence and citations for many claims remain weak, I have written a major update to the main article. I have tried to incorporate all the key claims in the original article, but have also emphasised that some issues are highly speculative and not universally accepted, while others have general agreement.
I have tried to highlight some of the confusions that often arise relating to the "sandbox", and search engine optimisation techniques. The article needs more work, particularly in reviewing the sources and links (I have left the external links section the same, but agree with above comments that some links are of little value).
I'm not sure of the standard procedures for this kind of thing, and have removed the "disputed" and "not verified" tags for now as the main article now makes it clear (I hope) which ideas and theories are still strongly disputed and speculative, and which are more widely accepted.
Further constructive comments or additions to the article welcome.
Howard
Could we please agree a way forward for this article? Despite raising a number of concerns and offering suggested changes and additions in this discussion, no changes have actually been made (prior to the update I made yesterday, reworking the whole article).
The main issue is that the article (before yesterday's update) makes many speculative claims with little or no evidence to back them up, and also fails to make clear that much of what people beli
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