OK, :tz: is listed in Google as well. They are cheating a bit because the date says May 6 – which is actually what they have in the cache – however the results can’t be more than 2-3 hours old because that was the last time I checked (yeah, call me a Nerd – I deserve it).
The Million-Dollar-Question is: what about the sandbox? As I mentioned earlier, the domain has been around for years, but never had any content on it except for a “content may follow some time” disclaimer. It was never indexed in Google before. So for the eyes of the spider, it has to be less than a week old. Yet it is spidered, indexed and listed. This is actually against ALL experience by thousands of webmasters worldwide.
Now I am not as vain as to think this is because I am such a nice guy. So what can be the reason? Several explanations come to mind:
- Google has access to the WHOIS information so it knows that :tz: is around for some years
- Google treats blogs different (that would be huge news where all those optimizers and spammers would jump upon)
- The sandbox is gone (that would be even bigger news)
- I’m showing up only temporary and will vanish again in a few days, to serve my time in the sandbox (which has been reported on a few occasions by other webmasters)
I guess it’s either #1 or #4.
The sandbox has nothing to do with being listed in Google. You can be listed and will still stay in the sandbox. The sandbox effect means that you are listed, but your position within the search results will be not as good as it could be without the sandbox. After leaving the sanbox phase your website will raise it’s Google position for regular searches.
Jan, you have not been the only one to point this out to me. Obviously I have misinterpreted the whole sandbox issue. I was under the impression that being sandboxed means to not show up in the result pages AT ALL. The majority of researchers in sandbox-theory (note that the existance of the sanbox has never been confirmed by Google) claim, that being sandboxed means that you only show up in the depths of the result pages. The only way to show up in front positions is for very specific exact-match queries. I can confirm this for this blog. So I was wrong and the lot of you was right.