Google updates it’s PageRank every 3 months, although it crawls and indexes websites and checks backlinks on a daily basis, it only updates the PR of websites to webmasters on a quarterly basis. Websites in the internet come and go and there are also what we call throw away domains; domains that will not last long in the web and will be deleted once it accomplishes its intended purpose successfully or not. In three months time a newly launched website by doing unethical or black hat SEO can acquire hundreds or thousands of backlinks and might easily get a high PR in such short a time. Fortunately SEO experts believe that Google has placed some controls to fight this bad practice and SEO professionals coined the term “Google Sandbox” for this control.

The “Google Sandbox” is not in any way connected with Google, it was just a term made by website owners and SEO professionals to describe why newly launched websites have poor rankings. SEO professionals rely mainly on the way how search engines rank websites on top of search results, for Google they rely on the algorithm that Google uses in determining the rank of a certain website when someone searches the internet. Athough this sandbox concept has not been proven conclusively, many SEO experts believe it does exist in the algorithm on how Google computes the PageRank of websites. There are of course exceptions to this sandbox, many websites who are new to the web have acquired high PR in such a short time. One site I found have a PR of 4 yet it’s only 4 mos. old.

Has Google really placed the sandbox in its algorithm? We can never tell, major changes in Google’s algorithm now are no longer announced. Majority of newly launched websites are experiencing this sandbox phenomena and some say it would take 3-4 or up to 6 months or more before you will be released from the sandbox. During the sandbox stage, newly launched websites will have poor rankings with Google as a means of control mentioned above. It’s like placing kids in a playground and they have to prove themselves first or mature before they can mingle with the adult websites. Whether this sandbox exist or not, rest assured Google is doing its best to provide us the most relevant search results in the internet.