Google Doesn't Hate Your New Website: The Truth About the SEO Sandbox
What is the Google Sandbox?
We’re glad you asked. The Google Sandbox is a hotly-debated idea that there is an arbitrary waiting period before Google will allow any newly indexed domain to rank in search.
Google has denied the existence of a Sandbox for years, but many SEOs are convinced it’s real. Some even describe it as a penalty, which is misleading.
While it may be surprising based on the name of our agency being Sandbox Web, our position is that there is no such thing as a Google Sandbox in SEO. In fact, we’d much rather any searches for Google Sandbox or Sandbox SEO come to us instead!
Why the Sandbox theory doesn’t hold water
While there are certainly many SEO difficulties faced by new domains (we’ll get into those later), there are some major flaws with the idea of a true Sandbox. Let’s examine some of them:
Nobody can pinpoint how long the Google Sandbox lasts
In its purest form, the Google Sandbox is defined as an arbitrary waiting period before the search engine will rank a new domain.
The biggest problem with this theory is that proponents of this theory all disagree on exactly how long that period is. If, for example, there was a three month period before any new domain could rank, then it would be measurable across a statistically significant sample.
However, that’s not the case, which makes the whole thing conjecture.
The “tips” to avoid the Google Sandbox don’t make any sense
The idea that a site can employ certain tips or tricks to avoid the Sandbox effect is logically incongruous. If Google is enforcing a waiting period on new sites, there would be no way to avoid it and no way to get out of it.
Further, these tips tend to just be generally good SEO practices anyway. Take, for example, some of the suggestions you can find around the web:
Disavow toxic backlinks
Build links
Create excellent content
Wait for google to re-crawl your site
Nick Churick sums it up nicely in the ahrefs blog, “Wrapping it up, just do all the quality white-hat stuff we’re advocating on our blog 😉”
But if the way to avoid, expedite, or get out of the Sandbox is just to practice good SEO, then does it matter if there’s a Sandbox to begin with? Perhaps more importantly, does the Sandbox theory encourage an oversimplified view of search engine behavior?
Google denies the existence of a Sandbox (and has a better explanation)
There are many examples of Google employees specifically refuting the existence of a Sandbox.
Perhaps the most interesting is John Mueller’s explanation regarding the assumptions Google is forced to make when it encounters new content. hasn’t had time to gather ranking signals.
You can find a more comprehensive transcript over on Search Engine Journal, but the crux of it is as such: Google comes across some new content, sees a lack of ranking signals one way or another, so it has to guess.
Sometimes the guess is optimistic, causing rankings to fall as more signals come in; and sometimes the guess is pessimistic, which means rankings climb as the content gathers positive signals.
To us, this seems like an extremely straightforward explanation of a process that makes a lot of sense. After all, search engines can only operate based on the information available to them.
So then why does it take time for new sites to rank?
New domains face plenty of ranking difficulties without any kind of specific Sandbox. It simply takes time to generate high quality content, build links, and establish proper expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (E-A-T).
So when we, and Mueller, talk about ranking signals, what exactly do we mean, and why don’t new domains have them?
Backlinks
One of the easiest ranking signals to quantify is backlinks. Put simply, a brand new domain isn’t going to have many links to it, and brand new content always launches with zero external links.
As anyone who’s tried to do it can tell you, building links is an effort, and except for the rarest of circumstances, it doesn’t happen overnight.
User Signals
This one’s pretty straightforward, too. Google considers the way users interact with your site on the SERP and the experience users have on your site.
If your site is brand new, it won’t have any history of user experience for a search engine to consider. (This is one of the many reasons we focus so heavily on user experience here at Sandbox.)
As time passes and more users visit a domain, Google will be able to collect more of these user signals, and thus have to do less guesswork.
Lack of content depth
Just like when you meet a new person and rely on them to tell you what they’re about, Google relies on websites to tell it what they’re literally about.
They do this by creating and publishing a breadth of content around the main topic of the site (this caveat is important; it would be confusing to users and search engines alike if a website that sold hair products suddenly had articles about medieval well-building techniques!).
Furthering the above analogy, if someone you’ve just met mentions soccer once, you might assume they’re a casual fan, but if they keep bringing up soccer, and most of what they talk about is detailed, deep insights on the sport, you’ll probably come to think of them as a soccer expert.
The same is true for websites and search engines. It’s one thing for a domain to have one or two pages about landscaping, and another for it to have tens of pages with deep content about the finer points of the industry.
What does this have to do with the idea of a Google Sandbox, you ask?
Well, most websites don’t start out with a broad set of deep content. That’s something that takes time to build. The more we tell Google about our websites, the less Google has to guess, which makes for more accurate (and hopefully better) rankings.
E-A-T
If backlinks are the most measurable ranking signal, E-A-T (expertise, authority, and trustworthiness) is perhaps the most difficult to define as a metric.
Google calls it “very important” and discusses the concept in depth in its Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines, which are actually an interesting read (or maybe we’re just nerds).
This is especially true for sites or pages discussing what Google defines as YMYL (your money or your life) topics such as healthcare or finance.
E-A-T is a complex topic, and this is certainly not the place to dive too deeply into it. In short, the E-A-T of a site and that of any page’s author are ranking signals.
Obviously for a new domain, establishing E-A-T takes time, just like it takes time for an individual expert to establish themself in their field.
So what does this all entail?
Whether or not there is such a thing as a Google Sandbox doesn’t actually matter (even though it definitely is not a real thing).
The basic truths of SEO remain the same either way, and the way to achieve SEO success is still to follow all the same best practices we always advocate for.
Ultimately, SEO can and will be a hugely important marketing channel for many businesses. It takes time to build up rankings, so Sandbox or no, the best time to start is now.
Written by Zach Kay
