Is There Such Thing As Sandbox?

The discussion about the sandbox is one of those SEO “theological” discussions that have been going one for a long time without an answer that everybody would agree upon, along the lines of “do outgoing links bleed PR” or “is Google evil“.

The opinions range from treating the sandbox as a thing to blame for all your failures and Google’s conspiracy plot against new sites to lazy SEOs’ excuse.

There is no clear understanding of the sandbox by the general public (e.g. SEO clients) and I’ve seen cases when the owners of a site that got banned when it was owned by previous owners believe it’s the sandbox – infact, this belief is not so uncommon. A banned site is not the same as a sandboxed site – a banned site does not appear anywhere in the index while a “sandboxed” site or whatever you choose to call it does not rank as well as it objectively should.

Matt Cutts gave us a clue into what it’s all about when saying there is no such thing as a sandbox but there is a behavior that makes you think there is one. While some say it doesn’t make much difference, to me it does. It makes it possible to say “it depends”. And it really depends on a lot of things. Not to repeat things others have said already, and probably said better than I could, I’ll just send you over to Bob Massa’s interview by John Scott – check out the part where they talk about the “kitty litter box”.