The Google Sandbox - Fact or Fiction?

The Google Sandbox is an effect where your website does well for the first several weeks, and then loses almost all of its traffic for several months, before recovering. It's probably a golf reference. The theory is that Google puts your site in a penalty box for several months to stop people from creating new spammish websites to rank #1 in Google.

Google has never, to my knowledge, admitted that this penalty exists. However at WebmasterWorld I believe the general consensus is that there is something in the Google algorithm that causes a sandbox effect.

There is another theory that Google penalizes sites that develop too quickly. If your site appears overnight and all of a sudden you have several hundred or thousand incoming links, then Google will suspect you of buying your links and might penalize you for that. If Google did this, the effect could be similar to that of the sandbox.

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In September I launched a new website. It did fine once it got indexed by Google. This lasted several weeks. Then it lost 90% of its traffic. It finally recovered in March, and is now getting twice (or more) as much traffic as it got when first launched. In one day in March, its traffic increased by a factor of 20 and it has stayed strong ever since. This behavior matches what I've heard about the sandbox.

Alternatively this could be due to one of Google's regular small changes to their algorithm, however the jump seems too sudden for this. And while Google is working on a major update, I haven't heard of serious effects of this type on Webmasterworld.

I'm very happy that my website is out of the sandbox. Now I'm hoping that another of my websites is in the sandbox and will soon get out, because its traffic is very low.