Google Admits the Sandbox

Rand Fishkin has it from the horse’s mouth that the Sandbox is a real, tangible thing (well, duh… but for some reason some webmasters pretend that it isn’t).

I asked him [a Google engineer] what Google internally called the sandbox. He doged my question fastidiously until saying that he would try to get the spam team to adopt our term, “sandbox”, so we could all call it the same thing. I asked him if they would continue using it and he said “definitely” or possibly “almost certainly”… He noted in words I cannot remember exactly that they felt it was having a remarkable effect on the quality of the index. We moved on to other subjects after this, but not before he was vehement in explaining to me specifically that they did not design it to affect “all new websites”, but that a “filter must be tripped” for a site to be “boxed”.

Refresher: Beat the Sandbox (a how-to)

• Get links that are quality indicators. e.g., get a link from a well-established high-PR site, get a link from an .edu, get a listing in DMOZ
• Get a few deep links
• Mix up your anchor text

And then wait a few months. It ain’t rocket science.