Are you befuddled by the time lag between Google "finding" your new site and when it actually starts ranking well? If so, you're not alone. In fact, there's even an unofficial term to describe the degree of difficulty that new sites typically experience before gaining meaningful traction within Google's rankings...

To illustrate the problem, I'll share with you a typical question from one of our readers that goes like this:

The Google Sandbox, of course, refers to the difficulty that new sites tend to have in ranking highly in Google for competitive search terms. The Sandbox is a tricky concept to address for a couple of reasons:

• First, not all new sites seem to be affected. Of those that are, some are affected to a greater degree than others. And the time it takes to be "released" from the Sandbox varies from site to site (though observations indicate that Sandboxed sites tend to be released in large bunches all at once, rather than one at a time).

• Second, just what determines a competitive search term varies in different circumstances. In some cases, a site can't rank for any keyword that returns more than 50,000 search results. Other times, it can't rank for any keywords at all. All this ambiguity has lead to speculation about the nature of the Sandbox and whether or not it actually exists.

From our experience, we can say we've definitely seen the effects of the Sandbox on new sites. Furthermore, when you approach the idea from the search engine's point of view (SEPOV), something we always try to do, you see that the Sandbox makes sense as an effective spam-fighting tool (albeit one that also effects the rankings of legitimate sites, unfortunately).