Have You Found Yourself in Google's Sand Box?

If you have a new site and are still not showing up in Google's results you may want to see if you have landed in the "sandbox" .

You can check to see if Google has indexed any of your pages by typing in site:yourdomainname.com into a Google search box. If no page results are found then you have landed yourself in the sand.

Being placed in the Google's Sandbox is like being on probation. New sites are put in the box to discourage spam sites from rising to the top to quickly. Usually sites that are competing for highly competitive keywords will find themselves lost in the sand for a few weeks to a few months. The normal is 3 to 4 months.

Your best plan of attack to crawl out of the sand is to spend this time building links from highly authoritative relevant sites. There are a couple directories which Google still considers important – Yahoo!, GoGuides and the Open Directory Project, also known as DMOZ.org. Getting your site listed on one of these directories will certainly help. You also need to spend this time adding rich industry related content to your site.

The best advise we can give you is to make certain your site is complelty spam free when developing it. Make it as search engine friendly as possible and you may never have to worry about digging your site out of the sand!