Does Yahoo! Search Have a Sandbox?

You might remember my article on the Google sandbox, a theory that new websites must wait before Google will take them seriously and index them high up in the search results pages. The wait can take as long as 12 months and is designed to stop spam sites from showing up high in results.

With Yahoo! commanding a VERY approximate 25% of search traffic (incidentally Google has about 55%) webmasters are taking more interest in how well their sites are performing in Yahoo! search pages. I started wondering if Yahoo! search also has some form of sandbox to keep “cheating” sites out of its index.

I did a quick bit of trawling around some search engine optimisation forums and so far the consensus is that Yahoo! does not have a sandbox like Google might. However Yahoo’s search engine does have filters like any good search engine should and these three points stood out as important to be aware of if you want to avoid being penalised by Yahoo.

• Make certain your website does not contain excessive affiliate content, that the majority of your content is original and more importantly, has demonstrated to be valuable to your audience.
• Be careful about too much interlinking between your own websites if they are very similar in nature.
• Websites should not contain similar content across the whole site. While of course you can focus on a single topic, don’t have article after article about one aspect of that topic.

The message here is to mix it up with diversity and content of real value. Don’t create another carbon copy website.