Does a Google sandbox exist for new sites? If your SEO-guy is an amateur yes

Over the past 10 years, I have have talked to many SEO companies, checking out if they had any new insights. Most of the times, if not all always, they talked about the Google Sandbox when it came to launching new websites. That sandbox would make it impossible for your site to be indexed quickly.

Weird, since I started with my first site in 1997 I have never had any problem getting sites indexed, and usually within 24 hours after launching them.

Don’t get me wrong, that sandbox does exist, but it doesn’t have to. Indeed, new sites, no matter how well optimized, will not rank high on Google (it’s a different story on MSN and Yahoo where they are rather quickly indexed) and will often not get indexed for months. Some SEO-people claim that Google can keep your site in limbo for 6 to 8 months. If you planned a quick-win online, that isn’t particularly encouraging, is it?

So why did this never happen to me? If you take Search Engine Optimization seriously, you will always have pretty ‘good ranking link domains’ (not link farms mind you) at hand, which you own and curate. With good ranking link domains I mean proper well visited, indexed websites that act as a gateway for Google to check out new links and domains via proper syntaxes and content. Problem is, lots of SEO-people are either juniors working for a bigger company (and often only capable of telling you what the books thought them) or freelance people with little or no own properties online from where they can ‘push’ an indexation.

The result of this : you get forced to start buying links in order to push Google to index your website. In other words, you’re already doing something wrong (in the eyes of Google) before you started. Of course, don’t believe Google is God, their ‘don’t do evil’ mantra vanished from their websites a long time ago. And if you think you should screw them by buying links, by all means do. But, that should not be your decision to make if your SEO partner has done a proper job.

My advice : check out a new SEO-partner, ask him/her for sites he/she (or her company) own and run themselves. Are these sites well indexed, well visited ? If your SEO-partner-to-be has no own websites that can give you a nice introduction link, you should start wondering how he/she will get your website up and running in no time without buying links. You should also start wondering if that SEO-partner is capable of helping you…at all.

Do social media links increase your Google rankings ?

Many SEO gurus have wondered whether social media links are taken into account by search engines AND if they can increase your search rankings. Well, too bad if you never bothered too much about social media when being an SEO professional, because the Googles and Bings of this world do take them into account and they can increase your search rankings.

That’s a B.I.G. B.O.M.B. drop, for many.

On the whole, search engines such as Google and Bing consider social media links to be very interesting indications as to whether a link should be given some extra (social) value or not (aka ‘link juice’). That they are being considered is theoretically not really logical – I agree – since most, if not all, social media links are ‘not followed’. However, from a semantic side it would make no sense taking that specific ‘rel’ into consideration when evaluating links which are (re)tweeted or shared.

Especially in the case of Twitter, you can expect its firehoze to affect real time (news) search results. It’s still unclear how Google does this since they no longer have a deal with Twitter to tap into their tweet firehoze, but the fact is that they do use Twitter in their search rankings. As far as sharing links on Facebook and retweeting links on Twitter, there will be link juice passed on if there is a lot of sharing and retweeting happening. And that is a massive change for many in the SEO industry who up until now contented themselves with onsite and off site SEO/linkbuilding.

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