If you have built a new website recently, you might have noticed that your site is not showing up in Google search results even for the most obvious search queries. You might be frustrated in seeing no visitors coming directly from Google search. This is a typical phenomenon experienced by nearly all bloggers. Many lose patience and give up on their website because no one is reading their posts.
Why is your new website not showing up on search results?
It is due to a loosely known phenomenon called “Google Sandbox Effect”. Google simply does not like new sites, so they put these sites in a sandbox for some time and during this period, your site may show some of the symptoms listed below
- Your website is not showing up for easy obvious search queries like your blogs name or a unique article. Or, your new site is outranked by other websites for these obvious search queries.
- Your blog posts or web pages are not ranking for exact match title searches.
- Your new blog posts show up on search results in the first page as soon as you submit it to Google, but it gets moved to page 10+ of search results in next few hours.
- Google lists your pages on their search results, but the pages disappear after few hours/days.
- You get zero or near zero traffic from Google.
These are the few examples of the things your site may experience while it is in the sandbox.
Why doesn’t Google show new sites in search results?
It is simply to avoid spammy sites from ranking quickly in search results and taking advantage of the system. Currently, there are millions of SEO experts out there who can create a perfectly optimised site in no time. So, if Google allows new sites to easily show up on search results, these people would create spammy sites targeting highly competitive keywords and by the time Google find out these spammy sites and ban them, they would have made tens of thousands of dollars quickly. If Google bans them, they will simply create a new site do the process all over again.
These sites are useless and give no value to Google’s users who are basically searching to find good web resources. So, by not allowing new sites to show up in search results, Google is simply trying to protect their own product from spams.
Be sure that you are not doing something wrong
- Check your Robots.txt file. It is found at yourdomain/robots.txt section of your site. If it is misconfigured, you could be the one blocking Google from indexing your own site.
- Check if you are not plagiarising content. Google hates sites which copy paste content and often give them lower rank
- Check if your site has quality content.
- Check if you have not done any spamming activity or bought backlinks
- It is not sandbox if your site was getting traffic from google and it suddenly stopped. It is something else.
How to get out of Google sandbox?
The only thing you can do is wait. Typically new sites experience this sandbox effect for about six to ten months from the time they are created. Some bloggers have got out of Google sandbox in less time by getting high-value backlinks from established authority sites. But, some others have elongated their sandbox-time by trying to get low-quality backlinks from Fiverr or by spamming the comment section of other sites.
What should new websites do in the meantime?
Don’t be discouraged and continue building your website.
- Keep writing new content and keep updating your site. You should have 100s of posts by the time Google releases you from this sandbox.
- Try to do guest blogging on reputed sites.
- Join Google webmaster tools and go to ‘Fetch’ section under ‘Crawl’. Now, fetch and render new links of your site, and click ‘index’ button when it shows up.
- Use a good SEO plugin like Yoast SEO plugin if you are using WordPress.
- Keep building good high-quality backlinks. Do not be tempted to buy 1000s of backlinks or spam forums.
- Schedule posts on your site to get published once every week for next 10 months. Google loves a site with good activity.
- Submit your posts to relevant subreddits on Reddit.
- Build your social media audience
The only thing you can do is to patiently wait for next six to twelve months. Be prepared for this long period with no traffic and you will reap your rewards next year. Don’t be like the millions of people who give up before they cross this sandbox period.
