The Google Sandbox is a review period on a new website during which Google checks the quality of the website through user interaction patterns on the page.
Once the review period expires, Google will be able to stop most impatient black hat SEOs from trying to quickly climb the search rankings.
While Google never directly acknowledged the existence of the Google Sandbox Effect, Matt Cutts indirectly acknowledged the existence of Sandbox for the new website in one of his videos.
In the video, he advises new site owners to put an upcoming page on their new site, and once they've finished developing the site, they should be able to rank in a few months.
How long has Google Sandbox been around?
For new sites trying to rank on Google, the sandbox period is usually around 4 to 6 months. But in some areas, it might be possible to get a ranking in 2-3 months or so.
But if the site publishes some examples of highly manipulative niches like lending and forex trading, then the Google sandbox will be longer (8 months or even a year) because when it comes to SEO these are highly explosive profitable niche markets.
For some websites, which may be mainly targeting less competitive informational keywords, the sandbox period will be very short, about 3-4 months, depending on the market segment.
How to counter the influence of Google Sandbox?
Skip the Google Sandbox period with these 6 strategies
1. Target low-traffic keywords
Once you start getting organic traffic from low-traffic keywords, Google quickly determines the quality of your site’s content and starts reducing your site’s sandbox time.
2. Follow the silo structure
Content silo structure
The silo structure is one of the most overlooked strategies, in fact, only about 20% of bloggers use it on niche sites. It involves creating in-depth pages called silos on your blog and then creating more blog posts to help silo pages rank better.
Build 80% of your contextual backlinks to your silo pages, which typically target highly competitive keywords and the remaining 20% of your contextual links to other supporting blog posts.
Make sure to link relevant blog posts to each other, a silo structure is not complete without internal links. In the case of internal linking, richer anchor text can be used. Google is known to favor sites with content on common themes.
3. Follow thematic relevance
In a new site, if there are not enough pages around a particular topic, it may be difficult for Google to determine the topical relevance of the site. To help Google on this issue, posting a series of topic-related articles is highly recommended, rather than random articles.
For example, if the site is in "Outdoor Equipment", cover the following directions: hiking equipment, gardening, camping, etc. It is recommended to focus only on "hiking equipment" for the first few months to build subject authority, thus reducing the sandbox period.
4. Get more reviews
Go to the spam section of the blog comment, edit the comment to be insightful and keyword-rich, remove it from the link and approve. This way, you will get reviews from different IPs, the benefit of keywords, and reviews that sound natural.
5. Follow link speed
Link speed refers to the rate at which backlinks are built to a site, keep in mind that rushing backlinks from the start may seem abnormal, Google will keep an eye on the site and may extend the sandbox period.
6. Enhance page user interaction
Google is increasingly emphasizing on-page user interaction, metrics such as time on page, bounce rate, and more. Google uses Google Analytics, the Chrome browser, and the above metrics give Google a clear picture of content quality.
During the first few days of your new site, make sure to reduce your bounce rate and increase the time your visitors spend on your site.
This is critical for new sites, as the Google Sandbox is in an incubation period, so Google will keep an eye on the site, making sure to regularly dig into Google Analytics and fix pages on the site with low engagement rates.
Summarize: How to get out of Google sandbox?
These are some of the ways to speed up Google Sandbox and rank your site, and while the strategies I've presented in this article may not completely get rid of Google Sandbox's impact on your site, they can be greatly mitigated and take less time.