I have always been confused of what the sandbox effect actually is. Various people seem to explain it as different things. I have heard everything from aliens influence your search result to google is simply shy and doesnt like new people. I have a site that was created on august 20th. These are the month's search engine results. MSN 305 305 - Yahoo 9 9 - Google 9 9 - Dogpile 4 4 - Search.com 3 3 - AltaVista 1 1 Is the sandbox effect causing google to be nowhere near the traffic of MSN, or am I just much better with optimizing for MSN?
Well, both. MSN is very easy to optimize for, IMHO. I have found that you can just do basic keyword optimization, join a couple link farms(not that I am recommending that) and put your keyword phrases in your anchor text & bingo...top 10 on MSN! An example is www.freewebs.com/phytonutrients I put this site up a couple weeks ago, joined an automated link exchange, & bingo! I'm now #4 for phytonutrients on MSN. Once again, I'm not recommending the use of link farms...but I don't give a hoot if this site get's penalized, as it is just a little splash page....as you can tell from the design, I've not spent any time to speak on this site.
my figures look similar to that (altho more like msn = 1,000, google = 200) but the fact is the hits from google come from "really realy really long keywords" and msn brings traffic from "main keyword", the sandbox just stops you ranking for anything you want to really.
I have also had similar results with the sandbox. I tell my friends that I am in to impress them. -Peter