No this is not a how-to, on beating the so-called "Google Sandbox". If that's what you are looking for there are plenty of forum discussions to help you out with that. What I have to offer to you is my recent and personal experience with getting a page to rank on Google.

There are professionals out there that spend every waking moment on making a page rank in the top 10 of Google (preferably #1) and for good reason. The top 3 ranking sites on Google tend to get 85% or more of the click through rates by regular web users. For terms that are searched 115,000 times a year, a site is almost guaranteed 90,000 hits per year or 2,500 hits per day. That's just for one page with one term. Just imagine what type of traffic you could get if you had 50 pages ranked in the top 3 for highly searched phrases. ALOT!

So this Google Sandbox, what's it all about?

From my understanding Google is known to have a safety system which requires a site to be legit before it will begin to show in the top of Google searched results. It is said that Google checks a few key things before it lets you out of this so-called "Google Sandbox".

• The age of your domain - I'm told 9 months is the golden rule ( hmmm, what else do we know takes 9 months to mature? I wonder if this is how the people at Google choose their algorithms. )
• The quality of back links to your page - the 9 month rule can be shortened if you are able to get a back link from a '.org' site or a site that has a page rank of 5 or better.
• The quality of content on your page
• The age/quality of your competition
• How integrated into Google you have made your site - not really a theory I've heard before but it makes sense that if a site is using Google Hosted, Google Analytics, and Google Webmaster Tools thier servers are being bombarded with your data that it would make you hard to ignore.

With all that said I think a proper name for the "Google Sandbox" would be the "Google Time-out".

Now here's my most recent experience. This site ( http://www.thethisorthat.com ) was purchased as a brand new domain less than 3 months ago. There was no content here until 11/29/06, at which point I had Drupal 5.0 installed and I started development on a sliding menu ( http://www.thethisorthat.com/drupal-slide-menus ). I never intended to show up on Google, I wasn't even writing my presentation of the new module with SEO in mind. I tried to create a buzz by posting up on digg.com, vbdrupal.com, and drupal.org. The next day I checked my analytics and saw that I actually had a very small bit of traffic from google for the term 'drupal sliding menu'. I replicated the search, low and behold:

• Drupal.org - the same post where I posted back to my site was #1
• thethisorthat.com - index page where my new post go before getting buried in the site was #2

I understand the reason of no competing terms, along with 100 other reasons why I might be listed. What I don't understand is the time frame in which it occurred. No Joke, it was over night. This in my mind disproves the entire concept of a Google Sandbox or if one does exist it is limited for terms that are highly competitive.

So I offer this concept of SEO/SEM to anyone out there. Don't worry so much on the really hard to get terms. Create something original and from that point on it's your duty to go out there and make sure your key phrase gets more heavily searched.

UPDATE - I just checked Google. I now rank #1 & #2 for any combination or variation for the 'drupal sliding menu'