If you ever came out with a brand new site and permanently acquired good rankings in Google for even a middle-of-the-road phrase in terms of competitiveness you’ve accomplished something no professional SEO can do.

New sites don’t acquire good rankings for most phrases (phrases that aren’t their company name) for more than a week or two in Google’s search engine. The normal formula goes like this: site is launched, site shows up for a week for some of the terms being targeted, site drops out of rankings almost completely for nine months, site pops back up shooting through the ranks. This phenomenon is described by search engine optimizers as the “Google Sandbox.” Some folks deny the existence of the Sandbox, but haven’t given the evidence that everyone is waiting to see:

A site that’s been around for less than six months (now it looks more like nine to twelve months) that is ranked well for a good term.

Seeing the Sandbox Effect, Denying the Existence

Some people deny the existence of the sandbox because Google isn’t directly trying to create this effect for new sites. This doesn’t matter. It happens to all sites, and it is useful to talk of the effect because the algorithm creates it whether or not Google intended on it.

What the Sandbox Effect Might Be

Google in its patent application talks about analyzing links, including the age of links. The effect is most likely a characteristic of the algorithm that affects all sites for all ranking calculations that happens to affect new sites particularly because they don’t have old links or a linking history. This means it might also be observed for old sites that begin targeting new phrases without a linking history that targets rankings for this new phrase.