A few weeks ago, I presented myself with a challenge to do some Internet sleuthing and get to the bottom of this perplexing condition that newly search engine optimized websites (thats SEO) face known as the Google Sandbox. At times this endeavor made me empathize with Captain Ahab chasing his white whale, but unlike Ahab, Im not going to meet a watery grave today. ICMediaDirect.com provides SEOs with life jackets so I got that going for me, which is good. The obsession to confirm, pin down, and counteract the effects of this Sandbox is proving as difficult and elusive as any whale hunt Ive ever been on.
Before explaining to the uninitiated just what the Sandbox is exactly, or what its purported to be, it warrants mentioning that Google officially neither confirms nor denies its existence. So from the word go we wade into mystery. Were forced to consider the Sandbox as either a modern quasi-myth of the Computer Age or an actual no mans land created by Google where SEOs are pitted against the machine. Kinda cool, right? This would be a limbo, an undesired waiting room for web properties seeking quality recognition from Googles Search Engine Results Pages are,...