It looks like FreshBlogger is finally starting to pull out of the Google Sandbox. If you’ve never heard of this phenomenon before, it’s a term applied to what generally happens to new blogs or web pages in the Google search index. My blog was well indexed almost immediately, thanks to lots of unique content as well as wordpress’s search engine friendly URI’s. It took quite a while, though, for my blog and articles to begin showing up in search query results.

The theory is that Google penalizes new blogs or web pages based on their own secret algorithm and gives them lower search rankings. This lasts until the blog has proven itself in Google’s eyes. There is a lot of discussion on whether this sandbox effect really exists, but I think most experienced bloggers would agree that it is real.

The reason I say that it looks like I’m starting to get out of the sandbox is because I’m getting more search engine traffic now than ever before. It’s not much, but it’s currently over 5% of the unique visitors who come to this blog. This is a good start. It had been steady at between 2 and 3% for the past 3 months and in the last few weeks it’s started to pick up.

I’ve been working to minimize this whole sandbox effect on my blog and it’s been fairly successful. I’m planning on writing a 5 minute how to post on what I did and what you can do to minimize the length of time your new blog or site spends in the sandbox.