SEO Advice

There is a lot of talk about the Google sandbox these days in the blogosphere and various SEO and SEM related web sites. First of all, what is it? Well, quite simply, the Google sandbox is the equivilent of search engine purgatory where new sites exist for up to a year. During their sad existance in the sandbox, they don’t rank (or rank well) for keyphrases that they should. Why does the sandbox exist? Its believed that it’s there to prevent new, mainly spammy sites from popping up and ranking well right away. It forces sites to have to earn their rankings by waiting a while.

The thing about the sandbox is that there is no real way to avoid it. Most sites fall in no matter what kind of quality links they have pointing their way.

There is one loophole: it appears as though keywords or keyphrases that exist in your domain name will rank well even though others do not. This site is a great example. It is new (just over a month old) and and does not rank at all for any seo related keyphrases. Although suprisingly enough, it ranks 11th in Google for seo advice.