It is Thanksgiving night. I’m lying in bed with my beautiful wife almost asleep. What pops into my head? Google’s Sandbox and the ongoing theory in the SEO community that trust is the way to get out faster.

Don’t get me wrong - I think trust is an issue for getting out of the sandbox. In fact, I predicted it about a year ago. But I think “trust” is misleading and only part of the equation.

First a little background on the Google Sandbox. The sandbox is a mysterious filter, or set of filters, that appeared in 2004 that Google applied to new websites. It prevents those sites from getting high rankings for competitive keywords. Even if the site shows similar characteristics as older sites it just doesn’t get the exposure - and associated traffic - as other sites.

This makes launching a new venture online more expensive as you have to wait months to start getting real traffic from Google which currently holds over 50% of all internet searches. That is a big deal.

What determines trust? More specifically, what determines trust to Google?

Stuntdubl has two great posts about trust and the sandbox. The first is titled The Trust Knob is WAY too High - Google Trustbox where Todd makes the case that the sandbox isn’t a “sandbox” but rather a “trustbox”. He points out that the level of trusted links needed to get out of the sand/trustbox is set too high and that it has damaged online competition as the big companies are able to dominate new upstarts just based on age. Quality of product doesn’t apply.

The second post is 12 Easy Quality Indicators to Combine to Prove Trust. Todd admits these factors are speculation (though I agree they are still good ideas to implement). Point number 5 is:

5. Get a half dozen trusted links (if I told you they’d no longer be trusted)

It’s ok that Todd didn’t tell us what links are trusted because Andy Hagans spells it out in the famous post Secrets to Beating the Sandbox 2.0 REVEALED: The Ultimate Guide.

He mentions the Yahoo! Directory, Microsoft’s bCentral and business.com. Three sites that are human-edited, categorized directories. Yahoo’s directory is explicitly mentioned in Google’s webmaster guidelines. The guidelines also mention the Open Directory Project aka DMOZ (currently down) which Google uses to feed its own directory project and is also a human-edited, categorized directory.

What’s interesting is everyone keeps focusing on the “standards for inclusion” for these sites and figure that is the issue that makes these sites trustworthy. This is where I disagree: correlation does not equal causation.

Google doesn’t care if you have a contact page, terms of service or even if your information is accurate. What Google does care about is relevancy. From the Google Corporate Information page:

Company Overview

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

As a first step to fulfilling that mission, Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed a new approach to online search that took root in a Stanford University dorm room and quickly spread to information seekers around the globe. Google is now widely recognized as the world’s largest search engine — an easy-to-use free service that usually returns relevant results in a fraction of a second.

(Emphasis added by me.)

Google is not a company of fact-checkers. If they were, they would clean up the results a bit better. Relevancy trumps facts or even better products in Google’s algorithm.

Google’s mission is to simply organize information. How do they do that? How would “trust” play a role?

Maybe Google doesn’t trust the websites mentioned but rather it does trust their categorization. I mean, here you have some well-established sites that have done most of the job when it comes to determining what a website is about or at least which “barrel” a website should fit in.

Maybe the big change in 2004 was less reliance on PageRank and more on link-based categorization. At the time everyone was swapping/buying/pleading for links with high PR regardless of relevancy. And link-exchanges were all the rage. Now many SEOs think “chasing the green tail” is a waste of time

What’s interesting is Andy Hagans continues to give “trusted” link sources like Wikipedia and Squidoo. Again, these are both strongly categorized sites.

Why do I keep coming back to categorization instead of trust?

Non-English Websites.

Websites that were not written in English were not subject to the sandbox a year ago and if they are now it is much more limited than the English “category”.

At the time I thought it was because Google just didn’t have enough people fluent in non-English languages that were also proficient enough with the technology to implement a sandbox filter correctly. But I think I have a simpler answer and simple is good.

Non-English websites fall in their own language-specific categories under the general “world” category in the Google Directory. Now suppose the Google Directory is a reflection of the barrels Google uses to separate and categorize sites?

To make a non-English site rank well is generally going to be easier because there is simply less competition. What’s more is the category of the keyword is duplicated in the language-specific category instead of the “top level” category.

So if you want to find a website dedicated to [web design] which is highly competitive you’d be facing some serious competition through multiple sub-categories. But if you look for the same keyword (diseño de la tela) in the Spanish category you see a tighter niche with far fewer results and less sub-categories.

Not only is the keyword in question different because it doesn’t apply to the overall engine, it also enjoys less competition in the category it fits in. I think most non-English keywords have yet hit to the threshold to see the sandbox effect happen but as foreign consumers continue the trend to go online and competition increases there you will see more complaining in the forums.

How to use this to your advantage.

Honestly, I’m not really sure beyond looking for a subcategory you can dominate before branching out into other categories. Matt Cutts has mentioned defining a niche and then branching out from there once you are established. I speculate that you can do a better job finding a less competitive niche through the Google Directory to get listed in and build anchor text for before tackling your broader keywords. This is a slightly different take on the “low hanging fruit” concept that has been around forever and you may find a bigger area that applies to your target you hadn’t considered before.

You can also use the Google directory to find relevant links.

Clean-up, loose ends and other tips and ideas

If categorization is key then getting links from non-established sites could be more damaging than previously suspected. Especially links from general topic sites and directories that aren’t established yet themselves (yes you could use this to keep a competitor sandboxed longer but once they got out they’d be that much stronger for the effort).

A handful of relevant backlinks may be strong enough to push you through even if the links are free instead of paid for. The three directories mentioned may seem expensive to start-ups and getting a link to stick in Wikipedia may exceed ability.

I don’t think the sandbox can be avoided if you are in a competitive industry but your duration there may be shortened.

Categorization would also explain why siloing works so well when you consider that directories are “silos within silos”.

Andy Hagans also mentions link bait as a method to escape the sandbox but I wonder if getting links from several different sources across several broad categories all at once triggers a topical phenomena or if possibly the anchor text influences categorization (most people use the title of the page or article as anchor text when linking).

Whatever the reason behind the sandbox, Andy’s tips to escape it are still your best bet.

There is a shortcut to getting traffic from Google while your site is stuck in the sandbox: buy Adwords ads. Of course this is expensive. And because Adwords is how Google makes most of its money it is unlikely anyone at the Googleplex will take Todd’s suggestion to “turn it down” to heart.

I don’t think I really said much that is new here, just a twist on how to look at the existing evidence. Hopefully someone a lot smarter than me will pick up on this and make me right.

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