Techniques to Avoid the Sandbox

There are 6 primary methods I have detailed below for dodging the sandbox's influence and keeping your website out of the 'penalty zone'. These are not authoritative and do not have direct evidence to back them up. They are composed based on the likely explanations for the existence of the sandbox and the SEO best practices that appear to have kept some sites completely unaffected.

Build Only Quality, User-Focused Content

This means no spammy, keyword-dense pages that are simply there to attract searchers. Build with customers and traffic in mind, not search engines. That said, it is important to still use basic optimization techniques - keywords in title tags & internal anchor text, use positive term weight and related terms, etc.

 

Build Only Quality, Natural Inbound Links

Don't let your link greed get ahead of you. Link farms, large sitewide links & big link packages from seedy text link dealers should be dodged. Change anchor text constantly and descriptions even more frequently. Stick to pages where the related terms count is high and the topic is clearly related to your own site. This does not mean you shouldn't buy links, it just means you should buy them individually, from site owners who can send you real traffic through them, rather than just as an attempt to boost link popularity.

 

Keep Link-Building Slow and Steady

Don't get 400 links in a week. Build links at the rate of 2-10 per day depending on your size and market. When possible, use content to attract naturally built links and stick to a believable pace.

 

Acquire Links from sites/pages that already rank well (top 50-100) for your major search terms

This is one of the best ways to insure that you build 'local popularity', the opposite of PageRank (which is a measure of global popularity). Not only will this bring targeted traffic from people who click on the links, it will also help to signal to Google that your site is on-topic and in the 'cluster' of trusted sites for a particular topic.

 

Conduct Frequent Checks for Duplicate Content

Many have suspected that duplicate content is responsible for some of the sandbox-like factors. Run Google searches daily with a long sentence from your home page and major sub-pages to make sure that no one is copying your content.

 

Stick to White-Hat Only Techniques

This one is obvious, but the use of cloaking, doorway pages, page-hijacking, and other so-called 'black hat' techniques is not going to be smiled upon by Google. In addition, unless you can retire on your earnings fast, the potential for long-term penalization could ruin your business.