soccer_star - 3:25 pm on May 10, 2004 (gmt 0)

I agree 100% with BeeDeeDubbleU and have done an experiment to prove it.

I launched a new site in March and linked to it from a PR6 site of mine. The home page was indexed within 2 days, all 100 pages were in the index within 2 weeks. However, none of the pages rank in the top 200 for ANY of their terms.

So I put a near-identical site on a free web host. I was careful to avoid duplicate content, but kw density, incoming links etc were exactly the same and again, I linked to it from my PR6 site.

Initially, same results - home page indexed within 2 days, all 100 pages in the index within 2 weeks, but significantly EVERY page was ranking well in the serps and I am still riding high with my 'free host' site a month later. Meanwhile my original 2 month old site with its new domain is nowhere.

If this doesn't back up the sandbox theory I don't know what does. :)

PS - I should also add my underperforming new site is on a different IP address to my PR6 site with which I link to it.