randfish started a thread at Search Engine Watch forums named Level of Trust for Matt Cutts' Sandbox Explanation @ SES NYC where he asks two questions. (1) What have people at the SES conference learned from speaking with Google representatives on the topic of the SandBox and (2) Can we trust what they have told us?
You'll see that towards the end of the thread (post # 15) I discussed some of my one on one discussion with Matt Cutts on the topic. Well basically, let me tell you how it went. I went over to him and I pleaded, there are many in the forums that are saying one thing, and some saying other things, we need something solid - misinformation hurts everyone. I asked him, please give me something that I can tell the forum folks. He gave his Matt Cutts sigh and then told me that in Google they do not use the term Sandbox and it was made up in one of the forums (we exposed that term from WMW here way back when). I said that is not the point, who cares what it is called, there is something out there. His response was, well look at sites like ChristopherReeve.org & Tsunami.Blogspot.com, they rank well and they are brand new domain names. Well, in fact, I believe a subdomain is not affected by it, but the other domain name example was a valid response. So I then took it personal.
I told Matt that I have a client who specializes in specialized environmental rooms. I told him over a year ago, if you write good, quality content on the different types of rooms you build (i.e. insect rearing rooms) that you will rank well. I explain to Matt that insect rearing rooms have little or no competition on the Web. I also explained that this client lives and breathes these types of rooms, and that the content will prove it. So he asked me to show an example and email it to him. I have done so and expect a response, probably by Thursday.
That lead Matt to tell me about some of the other factors Google looks at, like freshness of a page, and age of a domain name (or at least he implied that last point to me). I brought up, is that why you (Google) became a domain name registrar? He replied that they did not become a registrar to register domain names. He explained they can use it to further their analysis of domain names.
That is all I got at the moment. Feel free to join the thread or ask specific questions here.
