What is the Google sandbox?

Question

What is the Google sandbox? What happens in the Google sandbox as far as SEO is concerned?

When I submit my site to Google Seach Console, what is the process to move from the sandbox to the Google search index?

Answer 1

Strictly speaking there is no such thing as the Google Sandbox. Some SEO related sites will state that all new sites are placed into a sandbox which by their definitions is effectively a manner by which Google does not rank the new sites as highly as established sites on order to prevent spamming. Google does not actually sandbox new sites. Google does take into consideration the relative age of a site (based on domain registration and the age of the indexed pages) but these are relatively low signals compared to the indexing signals coming from keywords, organic links, etc.

Really what @closetnoc says is fairly accurate in that this may have been something that was being done a while back but these days Google has found that using the age of a site is not as accurate a method of ranking a site as evaluating the content of the site.

The basic thing you need to know about SEO is that you shouldn't be thinking about it as SEO. Google considers content as king and actually states that sites should be designed and optimized for users and not for search engines. A better way to put it would be to call the exercise Human Optimization and not Search Engine Optimization.

Answer 2

As mentioned in the comment to @anmol's post which bumped up this question, the efforts of Google's anti-doorway pages proceeded the term sandbox and is likely the effect of having a micro-door-way site. Basicly sites that if the destination page did not exist would have nearly nothing ... and these micro-sites were duplicated by changing only the city they were targeting.

In 2013 Google said

“Doorway pages are typically large sets of poor-quality pages where each page is optimized for a specific keyword or phrase. In many cases, doorway pages are written to rank for a particular phrase and then funnel users to a single destination. Whether deployed across many domains or established within one domain, doorway pages tend to frustrate users.”

In 2015 Google said.

“Over time, we've seen sites try to maximize their "search footprint" without adding clear, unique value. These doorway campaigns manifest themselves as pages on a site, as a number of domains, or a combination thereof. To improve the quality of search results for our users, we'll soon launch a ranking adjustment to better address these types of pages. Sites with large and well-established doorway campaigns might see a broad impact from this change.”

Thin content and duplicate content is demoted by google's algo. In other words one is put into the sandbox because of low-quality content and little to no natural links to the site or pages.

When the term came out new sites could get indexed and rank, but they needed to get some natural links pointing to them. At the time many people were creating micro-spam sites -- They got sandboxed.

Nov, 2022 Google says,

Doorways

Doorways are sites or pages created to rank for specific, similar search queries. They lead users to intermediate pages that are not as useful as the final destination. Examples of doorways include:

• Having multiple websites with slight variations to the URL and home page to maximize their reach for any specific query
• Having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page
• Pages generated to funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of your site(s)
• Substantially similar pages that are closer to search results than a clearly defined, browseable hierarchy