dot jobs domain buyers: beware google’s sandbox
July 28th, 2005
My company launched its Web site, http://www.hrseo.com, in Jan. of this year. It was released from Google’s fabled "sandbox" earlier this month.
The sandbox is a penalty Google places on new Web sites before it is released into Google’s index to be accessible by the public.
The reasoning for this was that many new sites were created strictly for the purpose of spamming search engines and ranking highly. For example, shortly after Paris Hilton’s sex tape came out, a myriad of www.paris-hilton-sex-tape.com-type sites were created to take advantage of this opportunity to drive traffic and/or revenue.
Yahoo! and MSN currently have no such time limit on new sites, and I’ve fortunately been ranking very well without much wait. After being sandboxed for 6 months, it’s exciting to finally be blessed by Google, and I can now focus on optimizing accordingly.
For employers purchasing a dot-jobs domain (www.yourcompany.jobs), be mindful of Google’s sandbox. From the day you launch your site, it’ll probably take about 6 months before even showing up in Google’s results.
That could change if Google decides .jobs domains warrant an earlier exit from the sandbox, but we’ll assume that’s not the case for this example.
If you’ve purchased a .jobs domain and plan to use it (as you should), do yourself a favor and at the very least create a Coming Soon page that’s live as soon as possible. Then, make sure that Google can find that page by placing it on your main site or another page that’s in Google’s index.
Once live, the Google clock starts ticking. By the time your dot-jobs site is ready to launch, you’ll hopefully be out of Google’s sandbox and ready to take full advantage of your search optimization and marketing campaigns on all the engines.
