Does a 301 from an old domain name to a new domain name avert the sandbox effect?

[jaimie]

Hi,

I have a friend with an old company name with an old domain registration. For internal reasons, the company and domain name must be changed. I plan on doing a 301 from the old domain to the new domain and leaving it that way indefinately. Will this avert the dreaded sandbox effect? I would say it would be reasonable, but if so, there would probably be a market in purchasing old, unsnapped, unadulterated domains and doing what I just said. Then again, maybe there is and I'm blissfully unaware since I'm a programmer, not an SEO :)

Perhaps keeping the site URL structure matters as well since it's less suspect in that case. Or maybe it's not an issue at all. Advice? Does it pay to keep the same URLs?

Thanks,
Jaimie. :)

[Robert_Charlton]

For internal reasons, the company and domain name must be changed. I plan on doing a 301 from the old domain to the new domain and leaving it that way indefinately. Will this avert the dreaded sandbox effect? I would say it would be reasonable, but if so, there would probably be a market in purchasing old, unsnapped, unadulterated domains and doing what I just said.

(My emphasis in the above).

jaimie - In my experience, redirecting an old domain to a new one actually triggers a sandbox-like effect, for reasons that you've already guessed.

Google is trying to fight artificial link network spam and throwaway domains, and has introduced some link aging factors into the algo. One of the workarounds that some SEOs were in fact using was to buy old sites to use their existing already-aged links... and to rename the domains.

Thus, I'm guessing, Google looks upon all renamed domains with some suspicion... and legit redirects to new domains become collateral damage.

Google might also be looking at redirects of existing domains to new ones as the sudden acquisition of many links by the new domain.

In my experience, if you list all existing backlinks (using Yahoo) before applying the redirect... and then request the linking pages to update... you will eventually come out of it. 301s are what you need to use.

[jaimie]

So your advice would be to try to get at least some of the links to the old domain name changed to the new one? Or am I misunderstanding?

[SEO1]

Hi Jamie

If there were such an effect it should circumvent such a thing.

However the google sandbox is an adwords tool.


What many see as a sandbox effect is usually related to either a filter applied by Google for over zealous link building (content building will soon follow as the black hats abuse this as well), or they have no traffic to their site to speak of.


The other issue is that with averafes of 1,000,000 competing pages someone has to have a site at number 1 as well as 100, 1,000, 10,000, 1000,000 1,000,000 and lower

Clint