How do you guys know if you are in the sandbox rather than sitting on a badly designed site? Most people here seem willing to wait 7-9 months to get out, I don’t mind waiting that long, I just want to make sure that I am not waiting for nothing. Or is my understanding of the sandbox wrong? (time it takes for a site to be properly and regularly crawled by Google and co.) FFMG
The sandbox is a filter google puts on new domains (newly brought or newly transferred) and the only thing the filter does is stop the sandboxxed site from recieving any decent traffic from SERPs for any decent keywords like "blue widget" you might get some traffic for something like "blue widgets are really green and red" The sandbox does not stop your site from getting properly indexxed, your domain may (and most probally will) recieve Pagerank just like normal domains.