Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
It obvious that you are new to the internet/website world.
The sandbox started well over a year ago. Basically its a filter on new websites.
You get crawled and in many cases indexed but you do not rank for major keywords until you are let out of the box.
The time served in the box varies from as little as 4 months to over a year.
No one knows for sure how or when you get out or what triggers the length of time serve.
But one thing for sure it is real and all new domains get sandboxed.
Hope this info has helped.
Welcome to webmasterworld! As of now it appears that just Google is using the sandbox effect.
However out of the big three, MSN seems to give you the best results early, followed by Yahoo then Google.
I have a site currently in the Google sandbox. It is kicking butt in MSN but doing very little in Yahoo and Google.
The thing you have to remember about search engines is that they are all different and look for certain things when crawling your site.
What might perform well on one search engine might not do as well on another.
The best advise would be to create a site that is good for the end user, and you should be fine with a year.
