The Google Sandbox
The new changes in Google over the past few months have demonstrated the existence of a very strange phenomenon in the behavior of the inclusion of new websites:
New websites that are added in Google seem to appear after a few weeks and they tend to rank extremely well, sometimes appearing even in the first few pages of the SERPs. However, this lasts only for about one week and the results dissapear in the 'Google Sandbox' along with other new websites. This means that you will be able to find them ranking more than 1000 in the SERPS.
This appears to be an anti-SPAM measure that has been introduced but it naturally affects all legitimate websites as well.
The website returns to the proper location in SERPS (not as high as it first appears) after a few months (3-4 months is the current estimate).
If you are trying to launch a new website you better take this into account in your planning. If your keywords are competitive then chances are that your SEO attempts will not be producing results for the first 3-4 months of the submissions.
On the other hand, Yahoo! is very fast for indexing new websites, but as you may know the inclusion in Yahoo! is paid at the moment.
Posted by Harry at May 10, 2004 07:47 AM
