How to beat the Google Sandbox AND make money at the same time	2.2/5.0 (5 votes total) Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
Rob Sullivan February 28, 2006

I’ve been blogging for a few years now. I started it as a hobby and the blog I had was actually a blog before there were blogs. In other words I was blogging with a regular website. Then a friend turned me on to Movable Type. It is a software which allows me to automate the publishing of content on my website. I was having problems getting my website/blog indexed by Google back then this was about 3 years ago. It was also around this time that I heard of a new program called Google Adsense in which one could place code on their web pages that would display ads, and the website owner would earn money on every click. I thought what a cool idea so I immediately applied for an account. 48 hours later I was placing ads on my blog. Shortly after this while reviewing my server logs I noticed that I was getting Google referrals!

That’s right, within days of placing the ads on my site, it had been fully indexed by Google and it was actually ranking quite highly for terms related to the content I was posting. I couldn’t believe my luck. Here I thought all I was going to do was make a little money on the side yet I found that the Adsense may have actually helped get my site indexed. Remember, this was before the Sandbox, but it was a time when link popularity ruled the web. But since it was only a hobby I wasn’t worried about building links. Because I already had a few loyal readers, I wasn’t trying to position this site.

Flash forward to December 2005 and a friend asks me to help him set up his own blog. Actually he wants two of them each with their own topics, and both very different in nature. I consult with him and on February 1, 2006 we register two brand new domains for him. He proceeds to build out his blogs and as he’s doing this I suggest placing ads on them. At the time I wasn’t thinking that it would help with indexing, just another way to increase exposure of the ads to generate more revenue for me and him. We agreed to split the money and he placed the ads on the two new sites. I didn’t think much of it until his visitor traffic started going up. He also placed Google Analytics code on the sites and gave me access to them so I could take a look to see where all this traffic is coming from. Turns out, he’s getting a few Google organic referrals.

Imagine that: Two brand new sites, both less than one month old, with no incoming links, but somehow they have managed to sneak out of the Google Sandbox in 3 weeks? Imagine my surprise, considering 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. At the very least you’ll make some money maybe not a lot, just a few dollars a month (Google only pays out in $100 increments mind you, so it may take a while to get that first Google check) and the best case is that you’ll bypass the sandbox, get indexed quickly and even start driving organic referrals to your site.

Like I said, this isn’t anything near a scientific study but it seems pretty clear to me that what has helped these two sites become indexed so quickly are the ads. So if you’re stuck in the sandbox, perhaps applying for AdSense is a good idea. I know I’m going to be placing ads on my other site to see what effect (if any) it has. My guess is that within a few days it too will start ranking.

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