For a long time Google gave new sites a temporary boost. Often referred to as the "fresh boost", this was Google's attempt to add new content to its SERPs in between of its monthly updates. But then about a year ago Google went from the regularly scheduled monthly updates to on going index changes.

About 6 months ago I (and many other webmasters) started noticing that brand new sites were not doing well in Google. This phenomenon has continued and is now being referred to as the "sandbox effect" - sandbox being a common term in tech talk referring to a testing/trial/play environment.

I have a few sites that are coming up to 6 months of being online, have good PR but the Google SERPs are pretty pathetic. I also have newer sites with PR and backlinks but no traffic from Google. And in all cases, the sites are clean, have been spidered by Google multiple times and are not doing anything wrong.

So has anyone else seen something similar? Have you been able to break out of your predicament? One of my sites got its first few Google hits a few days ago but I can't see anything that I did. I can handle a month or two but six months on seems to be quite ridiculous.

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The Google Sandbox Effect - is that what they're calling it these days?

Yes, I can't say that my newer sites (i.e. sites crawled for the first time by GoogleBot less than 6 months ago) are doing well traffic wise. I don't know about the "clean" bit, but at least one of them has decent PageRank - and yet no significant traffic off Google referrals to-date.

On the other hand, GIDForums™ was launched December 15th, 2003 i.e. 6 months ago today and traffic has been simply fantastic; so there goes that theory or what?

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J de Silva
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lol never heard of that google sandbox system err

*goes to research more on google*

I have a very new site. The first week I had it online, Google crawled it, but I was not *really* ready ... if my site needs improvements now, you should have seen it back then! lol

Nonetheless, I have more content now, after 3 months, and Google has finally indexed all of my content, since crawling my site around mid-July.

I've seen a slight pick up in traffic - some of it from Google, and quite a bit from other places, such as these forums. I can actually see in the logs that people are reading the articles on my system - every chapter! Wow, I didn't realize that my writing was so engaging! lol

Anyway, I'm hoping to launch 10 more sites this year, on a variety of topics, while at the same time updating JMRTechnet.com with new content. I'm hoping I can someday compete with my friend's site (www.comptechdoc.org) who's getting almost 200,000 hits per month and doing pretty darn good with his Google ads.