If you’ve ever started a new site, you may have found it difficult to get that website to rank right away. There’s actually a reason for this and ways to get around this problem to enjoy better rankings and traffic earlier on.

What is the Google Sandbox

The Google Sandbox effect refers to newer sites being limited to the kinds of high profile search engine rankings they can expect in the early days while that site is still new and unproven.

The reasoning can be traced back to marketers going out of their way to artificially boost their new sites using black hat SEO methods. Because marketers want good search engine listings for their new sites and will generally do whatever it takes to achieve those rankings including abusing the rules, Google typically will put new sites in the sandbox so that and until the owner of that site proves their/its worth it will stay in the sandbox in a presumed guilty until proven innocent scenario.

How to Get Out of the Google Sandbox

Generally the only way to get out of Google’s sandbox is to roll up your sleeves and create good content for your site, playing by Google’s rules. Here are some basic guidelines to live by which can help whenever starting a new site.

Buying Expired Domains – By purchasing an expired domain, Google will be less likely to put you in the sandbox because this is not a new site but likely a once established site which has had some traffic, link juice, and authority in the past. This enables you to hit the ground running.

Target Less Competitive Keywords – Keywords which are highly competitive are especially out of your reach when in the sandbox whereas your chances with less competitive keywords are not as affected by Google’s sandbox. Therefore you should target keywords with less competition to both generate some search engine traffic early on and increase your exposure and with it your links, thus giving you a better chance of getting out of the sandbox.

Get Good Links Early On – Getting weighty and impressive links from high authority sites establishes that your site is likely a high quality site itself and one worthy of a high ranking as opposed to a fly by night site. The easiest way to get high quality links is to create high quality content or link bait which other sites want to link to of their own volition.

Develop Your Site Over Time Versus Overnight – It looks better in Google’s eyes if you slowly build your site up as opposed to uploading the entire thing overnight. This is why I like using WordPress and the blog format as it’s very easy to upload content as opposed to a normal website where you would likely be more anxious to upload all of its pages at once. Check out my video tutorial on how to set up a website step by step for free and fast using WordPress for more info.