Wednesday, October 11, 2006

filters and the 'sandbox'

If you have a good, solid, large collection of authoritative, trust-ranked links, nothing else on your website really matters. The Matt Cutts website shows that. However, for normal websites (i.e. non-news), if you get these links too quickly, you trip another filter. Webmasters have termed this phenomena in Google the "sandbox" since it seemed to fit.

Bar Graph
Graphs
Headlines
Report
Tree MDI

For the past few years, it appears there is always someone who wants to say it doesn't exist. Or, they say the term shouldn't be used. For those who don't remember, Google engineers have claimed they didn't intend for it but became aware of the term from webmaster forums. Google approved. Yet, they had no official status for it. They wouldn't confirm it. This always reminds me of the old cold war philosophy.

Free Myspace HTML Codes
BigFinder
Whore Me generator
Myspace Layout generator
Pioneer

Call it whatever you like, it does exist. Links need to be collected slowly for new websites. Trust must be built. The term "sandbox" fits. For established websites with flaws in their websites which get knocked down in updates or "refreshes", they probably tripped a filter.