Is the Google Sandbox gone?
The short answer is no.

Three new webs, interior pages in the index some with top rankings on Google, not home page site cache and no home page ranking.  This is the aging delay in action.

Update August 5, 2006

Despite good signs in the past month, we still have two clients whose webs have been left out of the index since the last week of April. 

Update August 1, 2006

A small web in Portuguese, Spanish and English for www.iraplast.com is online and in the index with top rankings in Brazil www.google.com.br in a matter of less than 10 days.  This is good.

Update July 14, 2006

www.ecopinusa.com went online Wednesday afternoon, was crawled on Thursday from a link in this web, was fully in the index on Friday, dropped from the index and reappeared on Saturday with top rankings for biodegradable landscape pin  and temporary survey marker and we had our first inquiries from organic search on Sunday.  That's nothing to first place rankings in 5 days.  This is a good sign!

Update June 11, 2006

Further to May 10 below, we have 4 websites that have been crawled numerous times with no change in pages in the index.  Previous pages that were in the index are being dropped.  Google's behavior is still nonsensical and erratic.

Update May 10, 2006

Something has happened with Google's content filter.  It appears that millions of pages of bad content that would normally be banned from the Google index are in the index and new websites that should be indexed are not getting indexed.  We have watched perfectly good webs well optimized that have, in some cases, have more than 100 pages dropped from the index for no cause.

Update March 30, 2006

Indications are that the Sandbox is being applied based on the general category a website is in.  Poker is in the box for sure.  Some industrial webs are not.

February 10, 2006

It could be that the Google Sandbox effect is off.  We have 3 webs newly online that have good organic Google rankings after the first Google index.

I have not heard of any wide spread news that confirms what we are seeing.  One of the key points with our recent success is that these new webs are going online with all of the structural elements in place that we know Google likes.  How do we know?  Algorithm research.

Go here to read about structural compliance and the report we offer for a fee.  More information to follow as we put more new webs online.

Cheers,

Ron Castle