seems to me that 'sandbox is just a term for a number of things that nobody quite knows about. It's like a mythical creature that no-one has ever seen and gets talked about and discussed and pondered. To me it seems that you can only go on what the majority of people 's experiences are. I have experienced typical symptoms of the 'sandbox' and i would explain it as a trust filter. As soon as google trusts you, it will throw you back into the arena of the serps with a fair and fighting chance. I think it may well be possible to gain instant trust with google, but to work out how you did it and replicate it time after time is the holy grail.
Not sure, I was at a SEO course a few months ago and the speaker said that their is no sandbox. True? I don't know. I should have asked him some detailed questions.
Ive had varying results and worked out that it depends on the structure of the website, if Google like the internal links and relevancy of them to the websites subject, Google will push it quite high. My website went to page one in a matter of days and its only about dogs diets, nothing special and no massive selling on it. It has remained there for some months thereafter, I think because I keep changing some of the content. However, another site I have had for over 6 months has slowly moved up to page one, that is a one page sales site containing video, and no matter how much I promoted it and SEO'd it in the early days it wouldnt shift. Time has moved it, simple as that. I honestly believe that a site will drop quickly if it gets stale, not because of age, but because nothing changes.
I don't know if it's a myth or not and won't claim to know for sure either way. All I know is that one of my main sites targets quite competitive keywords and has not been sandboxed. My pages are being indexed extremely quickly and show up in decent spots in SERPs.
The sandbox is true, it just depends on how you interpret it. Newly indexed sites will possibly rank in the SErp's pretty high, but SE's have a term called "pipelining" wich is just a pre-indexing of new sites. The term "sandbox" has a big brother called "THE BOOSTER" that insures that certain pages will always show in the SErp's for certain key word phrases i.e Wikip@dia. I call is "blachat search engine".
I really think that Google Sandbox is not just theory. I have ran into to many situations that are only explained by the Sandbox existing. Check this article out which is the best I can offer at this time. I know that I should document each case and I am sorry to report that there is no time for this right now. But, the most important thing that I can share is that I have diluted expectations of the SEO practice for some categories and highly searched strings. It is there ( the high volume searches not to be confused with number of pages with string content) you will find the Sandbox alive and well... Article http://seosearchengineoptimizationseattle.com/wordpress/
lol, yes, the "Sandman" ? I could also write the reverse blog post documenting the 30+ domain launches we took part in last year and 20 ish the year before, none of which were visited by the "sandman" as Ive said before, if it's a highly searched phrase, then it's been highly optimised for by the rest, so you actually just rank (very) low because the rest of the field are a long way ahead of you. no mystery there. any actual cases of one there now (or the next time you see it) would be useful at this point.
I think sandbox is very new and it's trying a lot of advertisement even in our local TV this days just to get users everywhere around the world. Somehow a lot likes it but only for now, later, it will flashed out like sand
my site too got much visitors from google in the begining..but after 3-4 months i lost most of them.. maybe getting 0 now a days.. trying to get it back hope to get it soon.
Just to throw in my 2 cents on this topic. What if the sandbox is simply where poorly designed sites go? If you don't do a good job getting your site "Search Engine friendly" then of course you won't list high for long. There is a "honeymoon" phase it seems where new sites get a temporary boost in rank, but after that, any site that is designed well, and has been properly optimized, will noticed a much smaller drop in ranking then other sites. I've been building websites for quite some time, and I've never had an issue with a sandboxed site. I have had trouble with not having the right target keywords, and having content relevancy issues, but I wouldn't say that it was a sandbox effect.