I'm confused about how Google "sandboxes" sites. Is an entire site sandboxed (www.URL.com) or is it by specific page. Say I create a new page on an established URL. Would I experience a delay seeing rankings on the keyword I optimized for on the new page?
If you have a site that is already indexed, new pages should get picked up rapidly. If new page targets a keyword that is hard one to rank, say SEO, new page won't automatically rank well for SEO. It would take lots of backlinks to ever find it in the serps regardless how well page itself had been set up. Shannon
Correct, this is my case, I bought a domain that had in the past a simple site with 4-5 page, barely indexed by google. I was not aware of that when i bought it, but later discovered with the Wayback Machine, and hoping that I won't hit the sandbox, but it happened
Pages or subdomain off of already established site should work good. Getting deep off-site relevant links to the page and it should work great. Sandbox affects new and whole domain although subdomains may work for exaple store.yourdomain.com
Not neccesarily. seomoz.org was sandboxed when it spun off the main domain. Subdomains are also sandboxed when they are new, even on established domains. There are work-arounds, but it still happens a lot.