Why Does Google Seem to Randomly Sandbox New Pages From Ranking?

[Samwise89]

I published some content a couple of months ago that is better than everything in the top 10 by far.

I expected to see my post jump into the top 10 immediately by the next day, or at least in the top 50 and slowly creep to the top.

But it's been around 7 weeks and all it's doing is picking up another long tail here and there, and even those seem to be happening really slowly.

The content is definitely not over optimized and it doesn't have too many exact match anchor texts. It has zero, actually.

The keyword difficulty for this term is around a 3 according to Ahrefs.

There is zero reason I can find as to why this post out of all of the past 50 or more is being sandboxed like this. It's indexed and picking up other terms but not the main term and not many terms using the same words as the main term.

Is this one of their randomization factors? It would make sense to do that on indexation too, although probably not good for their business.

Does anyone know why this happens and is there any way to start shaking things up? I did get it a couple of decent links and social signals and still nothing. Should I keep waiting?

 

[turbin3]

What is your measure of "better" compared to the competition?

A couple months is certainly within the timeframe documented in their patent (often showed 90 days, could be more or less).

What does existing traffic to the page look like? Is it getting CTR to the page, through on-site traffic? How about engagement metrics? How about other traffic channels?

What about crawl frequency? Check cache dates in the SERPs, or server logs if you have them, and see how frequently the page has been crawled.

Although this will not always be the reason, what do readability scores look like for your page versus the competition? How about keyword density?

It's always possible some of the areas above could use some improvements. That said, generally I'd recommend staying the course. As we've seen for a few years now, their goal is to break you, make you flinch, so they can programmatically detect you and potentially suppress you. Hard as it may be, try to ignore the self-doubt and keep doing the good things that will make you win. Namely:

• Continue creatively building quality links
• Keep your outreach and traffic leak game on point
• Periodically update, improve, and add to the content if it makes sense
• Depending on the content, maybe improve UI / presentation if it will be a big UX win

 

[Samwise89]

It was last cached yesterday. I haven't checked the crawl rate but that shows they're crawling it regularly.

It's getting 10-20 views per day right now on long tails. The big spike was a traffic leak to it to get it some traction.

I just double checked the optimization and it's definitely not keyword stuffed. This looks more like a penalty than not being worthy. I'm 100% positive of that. But I also know it's not a penalty. It's the same as every other post that did great days after publishing.

This can't be anything related to competitors, because it's not even in the top 100, and it should be in the top 10 at least if not top 3, like every other post of this type I've been doing.

The only thing that makes sense is they've delayed it for some odd reason. I wonder if coming out of the gates with a solid link and leak was enough to trigger the delay?

 

[Ryuzaki]

I've got a post doing the exact same thing published on November 15th. I'm seeing the same patterns. Every post starts performing on this site immediately, even for high competition terms. The worst I end up seeing is starting to rank in the 60's. This post should be in the top 10 too. I'd say it's low competition, and about 3000 exact volume I think.

I have no clue why it happens. The last time I had a post do this, I waited and waited and waited only to find out for some odd reason Google never indexed it. I requested indexing before going to bed, woke up and the post was on the front page. However, this post is indexed. So I have no idea.

I'm just going to forget about it the best I can and see if it surprises me later. It's driving me nuts though.

 

[Samwise89]

This is interesting.

It's been getting very few impressions for the main term recently, but no clicks. It's almost like the old honeymoon phase to get some metrics and that makes or breaks the ranking. I don't think that's what has happened here though, because this post should, without question, be in the top 100 for the term.

It's in the top 10 for a ton of long tails and LSI terms for the post. The main term is 3 words, and it doesn't rank anywhere for it, but it ranks for the "3 words + 1 word". And for "first 2 words + 1 word" and all kinds of variations. It's just cockblocked for the main term like an over optimization penalty.

 

[nigeb]

I seem to be hitting a 'random event factor' more often in the past 3-4 months.
The SERP graph below is a 3-year-old domain with DR=52, TF=32 backlink profile.

Its niche has thousands of long tail keywords which I usually rank on the first page within 5-6 hours.
I've been seeing this happen more often over the last 3-4 months.

KWs sit in #20-30 for 4-6 weeks, then jump to the bottom of the first page.

Here's another article posted at the same time which indexed at #6, disappeared briefly then stayed #2-6. KW difficulty and search volume the same:

 

[shaunm]

I published some content a couple of months ago that is better than everything in the top 10 by far.

Unfortunately, this is just your opinion, the content is only one part of the equation. I know you said AHRefs gave it a score of 3 but have you manually checked the keyword? I ordered 15 articles today and while manually checking keywords for it I have about 5 that were 0-3 comp in AHRefs but were actually high comp when manually checked.

KWs sit in #20-30 for 4-6 weeks, then jump to the bottom of the first page.

I have noticed very similar time frames to this with my own projects recently once the domain itself had aged in around 5 month.

 

[ddasilva]

Do you have any other topically relevant content on your site to the post that is struggling? If so, have you done any internal linking to the new post?

For keyword density, I'd check to make sure that not a single-word is over 2-3%, not just the keyword phrase you're targeting.

I'm not sure how related the new post is to the rest of the content on your site, but if you don't yet have topical authority on that subject of the new post, that could definitely hold you back. For example, if you have a whole site about Intermittent Fasting that is ranking top 5 for most of your terms, and then you put up a huge buyers guide on Dumbells, you could be stuck at 40-50+ because you don't yet have authority on the topic of dumbells. 1 post on the subject of dumbells is not enough to assume you're going to rank first page just because you're top 5 for everything that has to do with intermittent fasting.

If this ^^ is the case, then I'd suggest adding 4-5 supporting articles and link them to the page that is struggling (varying the anchors of course). Then build links to the supporting articles, and you'll be good to go.