For those of us who have heard of the Venus flytrap know that it traps flies and spiders in it’s jaw and hold them there with no escape while it slowly devours them. It would appear that Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has its own Venus flytrap known as the ‘sandbox theory’, although we don’t know if it really does exist. However going by popular speculation from many search professionals, it does exist in various argued forms and is a danger to new websites. Luckily, unlike its Amazon counterpart it does not completely devour its prey.

Google has always preserved that “The Sandbox” is a figment of SEO companies’ imagination derived from SEO companies need to satisfy themselves and their client’s by making the name synonymous with the delayed time between the promotion of a website and it gaining results. It would appear logical that a new website would need to work its way up the rakings by building itself over time and can not expect instant positions after launch. This phase can be anywhere from as little as 2-3 months up to 1 year. Going by the number of companies that now resort to spamming and under hand techniques to get their website ranked, it would appear that a sandbox policy would be a perfect system to weed out the work of ‘bedroom bandits’ and black hat SEO techniques. The downside to this system is that some legitimate websites also get caught in the trap for sometimes exaggerated periods of time.

Read the rest of this entry »