Search Engine Optimization

Yahoo Dopey, MSN Goofy, Google is Mickey Mouse Lost in a Sandbox

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 listed.

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!

Copyright © July 26, 2005

Mike Banks Valentine is a search engine optimization specialist

who operates WebSite101

Previous Google Sandbox Case Studies are at the following URL's

Sandbox Case Study #1

Sandbox Case Study #2