AdSense and the Sandbox

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An Internet Marketing focused blog, with occasional musings about life on and off the battlefield by Marc Hil Macalua, SEO Philippines Founder and Philippine Marketing VP for US Auto Parts Network Inc.

Feb

Posted (Marc) in AdSense, SEO on February-22-2006

Rob Sullivan over at the TextLinkBrokers.com blog has somehow found a link between AdSense and escaping the Sandbox.

…I have another site that I started over a year ago, and have been dutifully building content and links, yet I can’t get it out of the sandbox. In fact, the current Google cache is of pages that no longer exist, and haven’t for months.

My explanation, however out there it seems to be is that somehow the Google Ads have allowed the site to bypass the sandbox and move into the index almost immediately.

The first Google organic referral came last week, just two short weeks after the site was tagged with the Google Adsense code. Since then, both sites have received a handful of Google organic referrals.

Based on this very small and somewhat limited test case, my gut is telling me that one way out of the sandbox and into the SERPs is to apply for and install Google AdSense onto your site.

I’m not convinced. Some of his examples are circumstantial at best. Definitely not something I’d stake my site’s SEO on. The good thing about it is, I’m so not convinced I’ve decided to do a scientific study on his hypothesis myself. Stay tuned for more details.

Comments:

Kates on February 22nd, 2006 at 11:52 PM #

On one experiment I did. Putting adsense on your new site does not get google to crawl the site. My other site which has no adsense got crawled in less than a month and is now PR3. It’s still inbound links that matter. These are hosted on free sites, BTW.

Aaron Pratt on February 23rd, 2006 at 1:56 PM #

I’m getting tired of the lame Google pot shots done by people who are not getting the same love they once did in the engines. I also have tested this and draw no such conclusion. Rob Sullivan must be feeling Google’s nasty sting, it’s game on now, either provide something of value and be in it for the long hall or fail, and yes links still help, well maybe not the “paid” ones…

Marc on February 23rd, 2006 at 2:02 PM #

Kates, I’ll be doing something similar on independently hosted sites. We actually have the same hypothesis.

AdSense the Sandbox Killer? -- Macalua.com on February 27th, 2006 at 4:00 PM #

[…] tch Domains in Google02/23/2006 06:08 pm Marc on On Google News02/23/2006 02:02 pm Marc on AdSense and the Sandbox […]

Jonathan on March 1st, 2006 at 6:10 PM #

My new site is only about a month old (although I registered the domain name over a year ago.) and it’s currently #1 on Google for an obscure keyword. It’s not about showing up on Google’s organic listings per se but showing up for competitive keywords. Beating Web sites that have been out there for a long time for competitive keywords is the main drawback of Google’s Sandbox, not just simply showing up on the organic results of Google. :)

I bet that a new Web site can similarly rank high for an obscure keyword too. :) Test it.

Marc on March 2nd, 2006 at 10:31 AM #

Jonathan, some of the keywords he said his site gets Google traffic for are:

[wifi] - 116 million competing pages
[portable gaming unit] - 2.3 million competing pages
[portable gaming 2006] - 8.2 million competing pages
[nintendo ds] - 19 million competing pages

[nintendo ds] itself has an YSM Keyword Selector Tool count of 108,031. I don’t think these are obscure keywords. If he was sandboxed, he’d probably be in the high thousands of the SERP for that keyword.

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