Is your Google Honeymoon over?  ..The Google Sandbox effect is known to be:

“a phenomenon that people have claimed to observe in the ranking of web pages that is performed by Google. It is the subject of much debate. Its existence has been written about but not confirmed, and several observers state that they have observed the contrary to what is claimed for this perceived phenomenon.

The phenomenon that people have claimed to observe is that Google temporarily reduces the page rank of new domains, placing them into what is referred to as its “sandbox”, in an effort to counter the ways that search engine optimizers attempt to manipulate Google’s page ranking to bring sites to the top, by creating lots of inbound links to a new web site from other web sites that they own before creating that web site.

We do not believe there is a sandbox currently in existence, although there may have been up until about 2-3 years ago or so, but not seen by us or any of our friends or contacts since then.

There are many confirmed (by cases of) Google filters you can fall foul of, but  seemingly no evidence relating to this particular one. We have been involved in or observed approx 50+ new domain launches in the last 2 years and have not seen anything that looks even remotely like this effect, (although we have of course seen new sites rank extremely low in SERPs, just because they are new.

This reasoning that it only affects high volume kw searches, or very competitive searches is just silly, the reason a new site will plummet after the initial fresh content and/or Google “honeymoon” effect is simply that in competitive searches, as a new site, your site is a very long way down the rankings.

Do you really think it’s realistic to expect a brand new site to appear anywhere decent in tough searches, and stay there? It will simply rank where it should, given it’s linkstrength (including age of links etc) domain age (to a small extent, as decent links will overpower domain age weighting almost every time)

We’ve had a thread running on Digitalpoint for the last month asking to see live any examples of the sandbox and offering to take a (free) look at it to try and diagnose the the problems, or to confirm that it could in fact actually be the legendary Sandbox, no luck thus far..

So we’ll extend this offer here too, if anyone has a live example of what they consider to be a genuinely Sandboxed site, please leave the URL here in a comment and we’ll have a free look and see if we can help.

If we can’t, then it may well be that you have helped us with a real live case..  ..we live in hope. – Personally we would also like to see proof of Alien abductions and the Yeti too, but are not holding our collective breath..