Webmasters and SEOs 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? Wayne Hurlbert takes you through most of what you ever wanted to know about the Sandbox, but didn't know who to ask.
What is the Google Sandbox?
The Google Sandbox is an alleged filter placed on new websites. The result is that a site does not receive good rankings for its most important keywords and keyword phrases. Even with good content, abundant incoming links and strong Google PageRank, a site is still adversely affected by the Sandbox effect. The Sandbox acts as a de facto probation for sites, possibly to discourage spam sites from rising quickly, getting banned, and repeating the process.
How would you describe the Google Sandbox in one sentence?
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.
Why did Google institute a Sandbox?
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.
Google Optimization 
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