Will the SEO World Championship finally prove that the sandbox doesn’t exist

Posted on January 16, 2007 - Filed Under Search Engine Optimisation

There are many descriptions of what the Google sandbox actually is, but in short most people describe it as a penalty on new sites which stop them from ranking for competitive keywords and phrases.

Yesterday saw the launch of the 2007 SEO World Championship and as an interesting aside, I think the competition will prove the existence or not of the Google sandbox.

The chosen keyphrase to optimise for is “globalwarming awareness2007″. This is an interesting choice, as whilst the phrases itself is relatively unique, it is made up of a very popular phrase, namely “global warming”.

One of the rules of the SEO World Championship is that only domains registered on or after 15th January 2007 will be eligible for the prize.

Searching for “global warming” there are already some very highly respected and authorities sites ranking for that term. These sites include Wikipedia, the US Environmental Protection Agency and the site for the “An Inconvenient Truth” movie.

Surely if the Google sandbox really exists, sites created on or after 15th January 2007, particularly for the SEO World Championship, won’t make a dent in the SERPs for a term like “global warming” against the well-established sites that currently rank in the top #10?

Only time will tell!