I believe it does exist, but is more prominent for certain key terms than others. How much of a penalty (if any) you get probably depends on how Google perceives your site when it is first crawled.
yes, it's the site in my signature, It's my blog, I built it in last November with 60 half-unique conteny, brand new domain. I got 20-50 ip from google the next day I submit it to google, but a month later, it was 24th,12,2008, suddenly no traffic from google, I know little about SEO, nor I use black-hat methods, I just shared my post on social bookmarking sites everyday since I built my blog, maybe too much. I stopped promotting my blog on social bookmarking sites, I did nothing since my blog was sandboxed but post an unique content everyday, about 2 months later, my traffic was back, about 50 ip everyday from google. But I was so stupid that I converted my blog from joomla to Wordpress and trasfered my domain to another domain company, because somebody told me wordpress is more SEO, after my convertion, none of my post url was changed, they are the same as before, but unfortunately, I lost my traffic again. Google bot still crawl my blog everyday, it index my new content soon after my post, no more than half an hour, so it seems that there's no penalty. So I think I'm sandboxed, can anyone here help me out?
I have rarely heard of sa site being out of the sand box unless it had some HIGH quality traffic, like Myspace
On this thread Mr. Adel Saud A member of the Arabic search quality on Arabic Google has been asked about (sandbox) , he said : There's nothing called (sandbox) ! You may translate the Q&A above by Google translate .
Wow thanks everyone for the response! I didn't expect 20+ replies lol. Anyways, from what i've read, it is only new websites and/or websites with similiar or copied content that get sandboxed?
If you keep you keep up with a low-intensity, long-term link building plan and keep adding inbound links to your website, you will be released from the Google Sandbox after an indeterminate period of time (but within a year, probably six months). In other words, the filter will stop having such a assive effect on your website. As the ·Allegra' update showed, websites that were constantly being optimized during the time that they were in the Sandbox began to rank quite high for targeted keywords after the Sandbox effect ended.