The present day talk of the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) world, ‘Sand- box effect’ is still a strange term to many of us. Webmasters and seo trying to achieve a strong rank in Google want to understand the google sandbox. What is it? Does it really exist? Is there a way to avoid it entirely? Of all seo theories, the sandbox filter theory is said to be the most controversial one. Not everyone agrees about whether it indeed exists, or is simply a series of other factors posing as a Sandbox.

In any case, treating the symptoms may help to avoid or alleviate the disease, whether or not the diagnosis is correct. Just as long as the problem goes away, it doesn't really matter. A friend of mine was referring to a site that he hosted, which he claims to be well written; decently SEO’d and has good number of back links. Though the site did extremely well in first few weeks, suddenly the ranking dropped completely. This has been the experience of many a search engine optimizers.

What is Google Sandbox?

A newly introduced website when placed on an alleged filter it is referred to as being put in the “sandbox”. A new website might get into the google search engine Results Page and may even perform well in the beginning. But when put in the sandbox and filtered, it will not rank well regardless of how much original, well optimized or how many quality inbound links it may have. Sandbox is said to restrain new websites from enjoying immediate success in the search engine result pages. It is said to act as a de facto probation for sites, possibly to discourage Spam sites from rising quickly, getting banned, and repeating the process.

The google sandbox is very similar to a new website being placed on probation, and kept lower than expected in searches, prior to being given full value for its incoming links and content.

It is thought that the reason Google created the Sandbox new site filter was to stop spam related sites from adding numerous purchased links and ranking highly for their keywords from the date of launch. Since google apparently considers a high number of links pointing to a site from the beginning to be rather suspicious, the links are not considered to be natural. Another possibility is spam sites would use various tactics to rise to the top of the search results, and gain heavy sales prior to being banned for being in violation of Google’s Terms of Service; and then repeating the process continually. As a result, new sites are put into a form of probation, usually referred to as the Google Sandbox.

Webmasters who are trying to get their sites well positioned in Google do not like the sandbox filter as it prevents them from receiving the huge levels of traffic that a top listing in Google can bring.

The google sandbox appears to be a site wide phenomenon. Once a site is removed from the alleged sandbox filter, the entire site is freed from the quicksand as well. That would include the sub domains of the site as well.

You can make out if your website is sandboxed by following a simple method. Check if your website is banned. If it is not banned by google, check the quality of the content and the quality of your inbound links. You should also see if you rank well for non- competitive keywords. Finally, if you rank well in all the other major search engines, but do not show up at all in google's rankings, you have probably been sandboxed.

However, Google still judges websites on the quality of their inbound links and the quality of their content. Google will continue to change how they evaluate inbound links and content, but the basic elements of their rankings will remain the same.

Not everyone agree on the nature of the alleged Sandbox, or even that it exists at all. But I believe the smarter one always expects crisis and finds a way out well in advance. A smartly designed website, surely, would find a way out of this “sandbox” trap as well.