Copyright © July 26, 2005
Seventy-two days ago Googlebot first showed up and crawled over
250 pages of a brand new domain in an experiment that has had an
odd cartoonish character to it, where unexplained things happen
with sometimes dark foreboding, a kind of Fantasia online.
If you're unfamiliar with the Disney animation classic,
Fantasia, Mickey Mouse plays a sorcerers' apprentice who wreaks
havoc one evening as he dons the bosses magic wand and merrily
destroys the castle. Comparing Google to Mickey Mouse is
probably not often taken to mean low quality or amateurish in
the pejorative use of the name. If I were to compare Google to
Mickey Mouse, it would be as Jimmy Carter did, saying, "Mickey
Mouse is the symbol of goodwill, surpassing all languages and
cultures. When one sees Mickey Mouse, they see happiness."
Source: Wikipedia
I'd suggest that most webmasters see Google the same way Carter
sees Mickey Mouse. We're very happy to see Googlebot (Mickey)
wandering through our pages and he definitely brings happiness -
if and when he ever indexes our pages. But for the past 72 days
Google has seemed more like the dark character "Chernabog" from
the same movie, a nocturnal demon who holds power over various
restless souls whom he summons from their graves. That is how
those buried deep in that evil sandbox imposed by Google on new
sites must imagine the search engine - we'll be summoned from
our graves one day. Google crawls after each article in this
series, but has yet to index any of the several hundred pages it
has spidered.
This consignment to a "Neverland" of invisibility by Google has
only seemed to plague sites with content in tightly competitive
markets. The category that this new site fits might be
considered competitive since it's all about internet business.
There are no shortage of sites addressing internet marketing &
ecommerce. Peter Pan probably couldn't fly if not sprinkled by a
little of Tinkerbell's Google Pixie Dust. The same is true of
Sandboxed web sites.
The long sandboxing in this case may be proof of the long time
rumor circulated among webmasters that new sites are indexed
very quickly for obscure or unpopular terms, while those seeking
entry into tough markets take longer to get indexed. The
question every webmaster asks in this scenario is, "How long
Mickey?" After the first two articles in this case study series
were published, one webmaster after another wrote to say their
site was fully indexed in 30 days if targeting terms such as "Grow Bananas in Pots"
But those in hotly contested areas, targeting competitive market
segments have found themselves in limbo for as long as six
months before release from the Google Sandbox. Guidelines would
be nice. Doing that daily search at Google using query operator
"site" to find how many, if any, pages are indexed at the search
engine gets tiresome after ten weeks of looking. Those who
suggest that it only takes a few links to get indexed by Google
can do a link search at both MSN (369 links) and Yahoo (7950
links). A result of the intense interest focused on this story
by webmaster ezines & online publications.
The second installment in this case study series ranks at #23
for the Google search "Google Sandbox" from the webmaster site:
WWW Coder
This might play out to fulfill other suggestions that those
sites that are well optimized with extensive inbound links
spending even longer periods in the sandbox due to
"over-optimizing" type of penalties. The site now fits both
descriptions as it's a text- only site (only images are the logo
and background) built to rank well that has hundreds of inbound
links. Would that suggest that it is wiser to launch with no
optimization, little content, lots of images, extensive
javascript, obscure market segment and keep quiet about the site
online until indexed and released from that awful black sandbox?
THEN optimize, remove images and scripts and slowly ease in to
the competitive arena after de-sandboxing?
How long Mickey?
A few words about the other three players in the search engine
game... AskJeeves has also not yet released this site from their
own version of the sandbox. Playing Sleeping Beauty here Teoma?
Yahoo is now showing 8,210 pages indexed, though they had done
the inexplicable and CHANGED THE URL of over 8,040 of those
pages sending visitors to error pages until we programmed a
special 301 redirect just for Yahoo to change all of them back
to those they crawled on the site. This is just plain Dopey
behavior and earned Yahoo the Dopey Dwarf role in this Disney
Sleeping Beauty toon.
Yahoo also earned the Dopey moniker by being very slow once the
pages were crawled to post new pages. We're seeing old versions
of the site, versions of pages that haven't existed for over 8
weeks now since Slurp first crawled back in May. Some new pages
are indexed, but they make up a tiny portion of those indexed.
We've found that Yahoo shows several hundred broken links to an
email masking directory we've excluded them from in our
robots.txt file - weeks after we banned the Slurp crawler from
that directory. Dopey, you're so cute, but real sloooooow.
MSN now indexes 6,162 pages and is crawling the site like mad
after each of these sandbox case study articles is published.
Their index increases by about 1000 pages per week on a rather
regular schedule. We've christened MSN "Goofy" for the bizarre
search numbers shown with a "site:Publish101.com" query operator.
MSN shows, across the top of the page on the day after each new
update, first a very low number of results, then a higher number
of results after clicking in five pages, then a lower number of
results after the sixth page. THEN after going to page 25 of
search results, it stops showing more results pages. So no
matter how many pages are indexed, Goofy shows you only 250 of
them. In a search done right before completing this article, MSN
shows 220 pages indexed on that "site:Publish101.com" query - as
do pages 2 through 4. But if you click page 5, it suddenly shows
6,941 results. Page six (links at top & bottom of results pages)
then shows 6,721 results. No more after page 25. Goofy, just
plain Goofy.
Dopey Yahoo does this as well, first showing 8,210 pages, then
dropping back to 8,040, then 8,020, then 7,980 down to 7,770 at
result page #100 where you'll see a link at the bottom of that
page saying, "In order to show you the most relevant results, we
have omitted some entries very similar to the ones already
displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the
omitted results included." But if you click that link, then
click page 10, results drop to 5,700 pages, until result page
number 100, which shows 3,140 pages indexed and STILL you can't
look beyond 100 results pages - 1,000 results.
Very Dopey, very Goofy and very Mickey Mouse!
Previous Google Sandbox Case Studies are at the following URL's
Sandbox Case Study
Article #1 Sandbox
Case Study Article #2
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About the author:
Mike Banks Valentine is a search engine optimization specialist
who operates WebSite101 and
will continue reports of case study chronicling search indexing
of Publish101 Contact him at
SEOptimism
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