I've got an interesting experiment underway, in that I have two very similarly architected sites, related but hardly identical in content, which launched about 9 months apart. Google may deny the concept of a sandbox, but my experience with these two sites has convinced me that, somewhere around the 6-8 month mark, it's almost as if a switch goes off and a previously invisible site suddenly can get top rankings that were previously unavailable. This amounts to a controlled experiment that has allowed me to observe the sandbox phenomenon. Here are the specifics: I have two sites -- www.schoolfair.tv and www.collegefair.tv. SchoolFair.tv was registered in November 2004 and launched in December 2004. It was nearly invisible until May, 2005...and -- almost overnight -- suddenly started achieving top rankings for key phrases on almost every page on the site. Based on that success, I registered CollegeFair.tv in June 2005 and launched it with content in September 2005. Even though its content focus (and therefore all its content pages) is different from SchoolFair.tv (it focused on the college market rather than private high school market), it follows an identical SEO approach and focuses on similar keywords. Sure enough, CollegeFair.tv continues to be almost invisible while SchoolFair.tv continues to rank very highly. If the SchoolFair history is indicative, CollegeFair should suddenly break out in a couple of months -- at about the 6 month mark. There may not literally be a sandbox, but the actual behavior of the Google aging algorithm behaves exactly as if there were one.