[There is no sandbox. Although if you’re really very terrible, your SERP position is hurt. At least not in my experience, and in the past month I’ve been putting sites up that are dangerously black hat for testing purposes. In one case, one of my obsolete sites got infected with an XSS cross-site scripter that was framing to like 4 different sites. Well, for the experiment’s sake, I copied the iframe injection code and put it all over the place, making my site appear to be some manner of hideous mutated link farm viral reproduction center. I’m pretty sure that when the Googlebot saw it, it shat bricks. Sadly, I had to remove the site because my hosting company started complaining and asking me WTF I was doing, but the site was up for about a month and was reindexed several times, during that period. The site dropped SO LOW in the rankings that Googleing its exact URL brought it up on page three, with a whole bunch of DNS directories preceding it. Interestingly, none of the sites that were involved in the cross-site scripting ring that I experimented with were removed from Google. Even sites that had a malware warning on them were STILL findable via the SERPs. It is with these experiments that I humbly propose that THERE IS NO GODDAMNED SANDBOX! Stop complaining about it. Your pages are probably just dancing. What the hell do you think you did that was so awful that Google insisted on putting you in time-out anyway?]
The so-called “Google Sandbox” exists in the minds of many webmasters. However, is something that only exists in our imagination real or imaginary?
Does reality exist or is it just imagined? When you can no longer distinguish reality from imagination are you still sane? I believe, for the sake of our own sanity, that we should insist that the “sandbox” does not really exist. But hey, that’s just my reality, your own experience of reality may vary from mine.
What is “really” happening is not a sandbox, however, the “sandbox” is indeed what they seem to imagine. The difference is in what is real and what is imagined. We must be careful to not lose touch with what is real or we may lose a grasp of our sanity. What I’m asserting is that this goes beyond semantics and crosses over into our perceptions of what is real.
P.S. You could perceive this post as a suggestion that discussing SEO in this forum could cause one to lose touch with reality and drive one to insanity. In fact, don’t we often hear folks speak of how Google is driving them mad (as in insane)?
So it never occurs to you that you simply have not yet earned the higher rankings? Do you really think your competitors’ techniques are so inferior to your own, that your techniques couldn’t have failed, that it must be a “penalty”?
You are stepping into contentious territory. You have the audacity to go after one of the most worshiped myths in the industry. What next, are you going to tell us that unicorns and mermaids are not real either?
There are a number of senior Warriors that have been trying to tell folks this for years on this forum. Google scientists and engineers have asserted that “there is no sandbox” from the earliest days of this myth, but it always seems to fall on deaf ears. Some people want to believe in it so badly, that you just can’t convince them otherwise.
Please don’t spoil that magical, mystical aura that surrounds SEO technology! Reality is harsh and your scientific approach is just going to ruin the market for magic beans and voodoo dolls.
