The Google Sandbox – How To Get Out

The Google sandbox is an artificial delay technique used by the search engine to let sites mature. It will delay your ranking for six to nine months unless you know how to get out.

The Google Sandbox – How To Get Out

A few years back, Google decided to make some major changes regarding how it ranked sites. One of the changes was a policy of delaying rankings for new or significantly changed sites. Although a reason has never been offered, many believe Google was trying to delay new site rankings to give itself time to figure out what tricks people were using for search engine optimization purposes. In theory, it would be able to tweak the ranking system to make the trick ineffective before it affected the rankings on Google. Regardless of the merits of this idea, the “sandbox” is much hated because it forces legitimate sites to wait for up to a year to get ranked.

Everyone and their brother will tell you there is no way to get out of the Google sandbox. In some ways this is true while in other ways it is a load of crap. The Google sandbox is powerful, but there is a way to beat it in a legitimate, ethical manner.

The Google sandbox is keyword restrictive, not site restrictive. By this, I mean the sandbox reacts and applies to particular keyword pages of a site, not the site as a whole. Most people assume an entire site, particularly a new site, goes into the sandbox. This is blatantly incorrect and this is where we get around the sandbox.

The key to getting out of the Google sandbox is to build pages for your site that incorporate low competition, high traffic keyword phrases. Each page should incorporate just one keyword phrase and there should be no more than 500 sites competing for the keyword phrase. You will want to build as many of these pages as possible on your site.

To identify low competition, high traffic keyword phrases, you need to use wordtracker. While you are better off buying a year subscription, you can get a license for a couple days for less than $8. Once you get into the system, you want to do the following:

1. Go to Projects by clicking the button in the top right.

2. Set up a project and then click the “wordtracker” button in it.

3. On the resulting page, enter a single, short keyword phrase in the box on the right.

4. Click “proceed” and then load all the keywords into your basket [blue line above phrases].

5. Click the “Step 3” button and then do a competition search. Pick Google as the search engine.

The resulting information presents you with all the phrases and the keyword effectiveness index [kei]. Ignore this information. Instead, look for phrases with traffic and a low number of sites competing for the keyword phrase.

Word Tracker

Once you have the list of phrases, start building a single page for each keyword phrase on your site. If you optimize the pages correctly and have a decent link count, these pages will not go into the sandbox.

With this strategy, you want all of the initial pages on your site to use these low competion phrases. Do so and your page rank will go through the roof and you will escape the Google sandbox. Wondering how to get out of the Google sandbox? Now you know.

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