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Amazing article about the Google Sandbox. Saw it mentioned in ProBlogger. I guess you learn something new every day…
Excerpt:
What is the Google Sandbox?
The Google Sandbox is an alleged filter placed on new websites. The result is a site does not receive good rankings for its most important keywords and keyword phrases. Even with good content, abundant incoming links and strong Google PageRank, a site is still adversely affected by the Sandbox effect. The Sandbox acts as a de facto probation for sites, possibly to discourage spam sites from rising quickly, getting banned, and repeating the process.
Yes, this very site is currently in the Sandbox. It’s still less than a month and a half old, so I guess it’s normal. That explains why I get so few hits from Google searches, even though the site is very well indexed (and regularly crawled) by it.
Supposedly, when a site gets out of the Sandbox, it starts getting a deluge of hits from Google. I can’t wait. 
Related posts:
The sandbox effect can be frustrating. But just think, when google starts ranking you properly you’ll have a load of decent content already up here and people coming in won’t just be thinking “is this it?!?”.
Google’s Sandbox effect is a very interesting thing. In fact, it was explained rather well in their March 2005 patent (I have written post on that at my SEO Blog a while ago). But after the patent came to public attention, many web masters began to question the truth of some things in the patent. Perhaps Google is just bluffing to inderectly fight spammers. As SEOs we can never know for sure, just guess.
I’ve also only had my website online for about 6 or 7 months and have had very little traffic come in from google, even though I’m listed pretty well. But how can I know this is due to sandboxing and not just a small number of people looking for the subject of my portuguese antispam website?
Anyhow, great post
I’ve noticed this effect, but only related to AdSense – I’ve created a new site and I’ve called it “foo.litux.org”. After some days, the site was already in a good position in search, and was already receiving referers from google, but all ads clicks were paying $0. Then I’ve created another similar site (to avoid duplicated content – basically half of the content was in each site), but this one was called http://www.litux.org/foo/*. It took the same time to reach the same search rank, but the ads started to give money (not much, but at least not $0).
My feeling is that Google saw the new domain as a new site and put it on the sandbox, but saw the new URL as an extension of the existing site.
According to the Google Page Rank MacOSX widget, both sites still have Page Rank = 0.
Bruno: yes, I think that’s what happened.
In my case, it was a bit different: I used to have all my sites at http://www.dehumanizer.com/something, but, about a month and a half ago, moved them to something.dehumanizer.com. All of them still have a PageRank of 0, even though I see Google crawling them all every day. But http://www.dehumanizer.com, which is now merely a list of my sites, has a PageRank of 4.
Also, if I google for terms or phrases I use in my site(s), I get really bad results – not in the top 100, usually, which means that most people will never come here through Google.
“Pacience, young Padawan”, I say to myself…
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