The concept of Google Sandbox is not familiar to many people. As digital marketing professionals in all its branches (web design, SEO/SEM, content strategies, Social Media, etc.), we at Webbing Online believe that, in addition to providing the best and most professional service to our clients (or as we prefer to call them: partners), we are also obliged to play an educational and teaching role regarding each of the actions and strategies we carry out.
Because these actions, as digital concepts in themselves, involve a series of particularities that are not easy to understand for those unfamiliar with the subject, but which make up their reason for being, their way of working.
And web design is no exception. Leading a project to create a website in Madrid , for example, implicitly involves our partner’s wish to be in the top positions on Google. Logical and normal, after all 🙂. This is where we, as digital professionals, must explain to our new travel companion how SEO works, what needs to be done to try to appear in the top organic positions of the SERPs, and what the Google Sandbox concept is.
So what is Google Sandbox?
Period of time that must pass (neither specified nor made official by Google, nor demonstrated or verified by any tool) for Google to analyze, recognize and evaluate a newly created website in order to validate it for its organic rankings.
Google Sandbox came along to put an end to certain techniques used years ago to rank websites without good content, many of them automated, which could displace other reference sites in a very short time. How did they do it? By over-optimizing the site for the main keywords, with massive free or paid backlink campaigns, or by spinning well-ranked texts.
Now, Google Sandbox takes its time to check that the new website is not spam (the automated sites we mentioned) and that its content is original, high quality, dynamic and generates interaction (traffic and blog comments) with visitors. In other words, Google Sandbox gives preference to quality content and, in this way, websites earn Google’s trust and take the right steps to “escape” the influence of this peculiar Google algorithm.
Approximate time Google Sandbox has an effect
As we pointed out at the beginning of this post, it is believed that there is no minimum period within the reach of Google Sandbox. At first there was talk of 6 months, but in some cases up to a year has passed before a web project started climbing in visibility and traffic.
Se take several factors into account that determine how long a site can remain under the influence of this algorithm measure, such as the competition in your sector for each keyword being targeted, the content creation work carried out during these first months, the quality (rather than quantity) of the backlinks generated, etc.
The time our website would be restricted for highly competitive industry keywords (probably between 6 and 12 months) is not the same as for low-competition ones, which, with specific SEO work, we could rank within a few months of launching our website (2-3 months at most).
But the most common thing is to experience ranking fluctuations in the SERPs due to Google Sandbox.
Actions to take to get out of the Sandbox algorithm
The content is king and will remain so for Google until further notice. When a new website is published, it should not be left static; instead, valuable content should be generated on a regular basis. Also around it, that is, through the brand’s other digital channels:
- Website
- Social media (including the Google My Business listing, if you have one)
- Newsletter
- Advertising
- Offline actions
We want to stress the top priority that should be given (if you have one, since only businesses with a physical location can have it) to our Google My Business listing. Optimize it fully, add posts every few days, upload our products and services, and even create a website within the listing, which ranks brilliantly and can link to our corporate website.
The other social networks should be worked on with the same care, building a significant community and following a well-studied and meticulous content strategy. We need to build awareness of our corporate website as a source of value within our sector. It will give us visibility with our target audience and, therefore, with Google, which will help it recognize and value us sooner.
It is not easy, so you may consider investing in advertising to increase the reach of some of the content on the website.
If we manage to get reputable, well-ranked websites in our sector to mention and link to us, it is one of the most powerful and credible signals for Google. In this sense, interviewing a leading figure in the sector on our blog and asking them to republish the post on their website, or at least mention us, can be a good tactic to achieve this goal.
And in addition to content, and closely related to it, to get out of Google Sandbox as quickly as possible: backlinks of high quality.
Carrying out a natural and consistent strategy of building external links to our website will signal to the search engine the growth of the digital entity in the sector.
Conclusions
Analyzed objectively, this kind of “block” what is Google Sandbox makes a lot of sense in terms of organic SEO strategies. Everyone knows how much work it takes to do SEO for a brand properly, the time that must be invested, the resources, etc. Therefore, having to prove to Google that a newly created website deserves to rub shoulders with the top positions in the SERPs is a fair measure for all the players involved in the SEO universe.
It is not easy, however, to carry out all the actions we have mentioned to “speed up” the exit from Sandbox. At Webbing Online we help you with this so that your website has as much visibility as possible from the start 😉.