I got a question from Anthony Grace in the comments of my previous post Three Rules That ASP.NET Developers Should Know About SEO about Google Sandbox and thought of writing this short post to illustrate what is it and how to avoid it.

Google Sandbox is, in essence, the process of keeping your website outside Google search results for competitive keywords because your website has just been registered or changed owner.

When Google Sandbox

The sandbox usually starts when you register a new website and lasts from 6 months up to a year depending on factors that are only known to Google.

Google is also monitoring the domain registration information so this will also happen when the registered owner of the website changes i.e. you’ve bought a second hand domain.

Put simply, you are sandboxed when your website has valuable content and is SEO optimised and you are no where near the search engine top result pages.

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