The Google Sandbox Theory

How Did The Sandbox Theory Originate?

The time was around March 2004 and the place was World Wide Web. The websites created during this time around the world started experiencing and noticing a surprising change in the rankings of their websites on search engines. And this shocking change was that they were not finding their websites in the top rankings for their selected keywords. Even after being listed in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) for some weeks, their webpages were either not present in the index or were ranking pretty low for the most important keywords. This phenomenon was termed as Sandbox Effect by curious SEO experts .

Why It Occured?

One reasoning that was given for the Sandbox Effect occurance was the 'Time Delay' factor where the search engines release websites from the sandbox after a set period of time. And since a lot of websites started observing and experiencing the effects of sandbox around March 2004, webmasters assumed it to be the time delay factor responsible for their websites' vanishing from the top position on Google. But that is one version of the story and not a very convincing one as evidence shows contrasting results like websites created before March 2004 still not released or as late as July 2004 also managing to escape the Sandbox Effect. The most logical and agreeable theory that explains this strange vanishing act of the websites from the search engines seems to be 'link-aging'. This theory states that the age of the inbound links of a website is the deciding factor for releasing that site from the sandbox.

Clearing The Confusion Regarding Link-Aging

Many people are confused by this concept of link-aging asking that isn't it the website and not the links that age and grow old. No doubt,on the level of conception, the links to the website will get as old as the website itself. But if you stop getting enough relevant and good inbound links after one year, it is common sense that you will be trapped by the Google Sandbox. That's why many websites launched after July 2004 escaped by December 2004 and there were many more which were still caught up in the Sandbox even after Allegra update (where well ranked sites lost their high rankings and low ranked sites shot up to the top for their keywords).