All About SEO and Marketing

It doesn’t take long when one delves into the world of site engine optimization before coming face to face with the SEO boogeyman: the Sandbox Effect.  What is even more interesting about this phenomenon is that most people don’t even know if the dread sandbox effect truly exists.  Like some sort of SEO version of Freddy Krueger, the sandbox effect may only exist in our nightmares.

What has come to be know as the Sandbox Effect is purported to be when Google lowers the page rank of site in order to counter the ways that site has used search engine optimization techniques, essentially a penalty for effective SEO.

Why this happens, or even if it does happen at all, is a matter of some debate.  Some who claim to have seen the sandbox effect at work say it is only a bit of search engine caution, keeping a site’s rank lower until it can prove itself instead of letting new sites shoot to the top immediately over longer-performing sites.  It also is said to help stop irritating spam sites from claiming the top spots over more legit content.  Google in particular, says conventional wisdom, finds new sites with a large number of incoming links suspicious and unnatural, and so does not count them for weeks or perhaps even months, keeping a new site down in the page rankings.

Needless to say, there are a great many site owners who swear they have been affected and who scream foul at every opportunity.  But there are also a great many experts who claim there is no sandbox effect at all, that the time it takes for a site to climb the search engines is simply natural and has nothing to do with being kept down by a mythical search engine filter.

Regardless of whether the sandbox effect is real or not, what is undeniably true is that building page rank takes time and effort.  That there would be some rank jostling among sites with competitive keywords is to be expected.  You can utilize all the optimization tools you can find, but in the end, all you can do is wait.