The limits of the sandbox
There are a number of terms familiar to SEO experts that aren’t so familiar to everyone else. As knowing these terms can be of a great help when it comes to assessing what is going on with your site in the rankings.
The worst SEO experts promise that they can provide immediate results. If you even think of hiring someone like that, just sign your business over to someone else and step down; good SEO requires a lot of patience, and anyone who tells you otherwise is attempting to pull a fast one. The problem is that most search engines have what is called a “sandbox”; it’s a period of time in which the search engine watches the site to see how it will perform, and if the numbers generated are real rather than some manipulation of the numbers. The search engine wants to make sure that the site really is relevant rather than just a flash in the pan, so it insists on waiting a bit before it changes the site’s ranking.
Some of these manipulations are pretty basic. The most basic is creating some sort of popularity spike, usually by some sort of one-time advertisement. Search engines tend to ignore spikes as it doesn’t really suggest how popular the site really is; search engines are aware that anyone can create a spike, and so don’t really consider them relevant to how a site will do over the long term.
Joining a link farm is another obvious manipulation, as it creates a number of backlinks that are actually worthless; search engines prefer that sites that are linked have something in common rather than are linked randomly. Random links aren’t a sign of relevance; it just means that the site was picked up for whatever reason, and that randomness isn’t rewarded by search engines.
Search engines also place new sites in the sandbox, giving it a chance to prove itself before the site is placed in the rankings. The same applies to any site that undergoes massive changes; the site is effectively a new site, and the search engines want to make sure that the site will do as well as the former version. It should be noted that new content or a few code changes will not trigger the return to the sandbox; it requires massive re-thinking in order to trigger it.
How long the site is in the sandbox depends on how old the site is and if it has done something that search engines question. The general rule is that it can take up to six months for changes to occur in the site’s rankings. It’s because of how long that change can take to have an effect that you need to exercise patience, and that you really need to question when someone says that they produce changes fast. There are ways to speed the wait, but not as dramatically as you might like; it will never take as short as even a few weeks. By making a number of changes in a short period of time in order to speed up the wait, you may actually be causing the wait to increase. Remember that waiting is sometimes part of the game, and your site will do fine.