What penalties/restrictions does google place on new sites, and does anyone know when they are typically lifted? Thanks.
It is not that new sites are penalized/sandboxed by google. New sites starting afresh, google places them at the bottom of their criteria level, so that any networking efforts undertaken by the site can be suitably reflected in making the site go up the ladder. How quickly one is able to climb up the ladder depends solely on the efforts, to put up good content with good networking. Regards, RightMan
I know that the site effectively starts at the bottom of the pile, but had assumed there there may at least be something in place in the very early days to make limit the site in terms of its reach. We know for instance that sites around for years are given benefit due to that, so I was wondering if the opposite is true for new sites.
I doubt there is any sandbox effect. Try submitting your site to a few dozen social bookmarking sites and some SEO friendly directories. As for the buttom of the pile, it's actually sites that face the Google penalty that gets put there. New site can rank up fairly quickly with a bit effort and there tends to be a honeymoon period for them.
New sites do not have much weight,so they will not rank well. This means new sites are not sandboxed simply because they are NEW sites. But if you do too much SEO or black hat SEO, then you are likely to get sandboxed.
important point is that you should not expect your site to rocket jump in its ranking/traffic during its infancy stage. Of course, unless your website is a break-out similar to twitter and facebook.