Did you already encounter the painful experience of launching a new website and no matter what you do it just seems impossible to get the site show up in the top 10, top 20 or even top 30 in Google’s search engine rankings?

This is commonly known as the Google sandboxing effect. It doesn’t necessarily happen to every new site, but experts believe that it may happen to about 60-70% of all newly launched sites.

But, what does it actually mean to “get sandboxed”?

Truth is, no one knows exactly, except maybe a few engineers from Google. Most search engine experts believe that there are various factors that trigger the sandboxing effect within the first few weeks after a new site has been launched.

It could happen that you launch a brand new site and after one week it shows up at position 10 in Google (this obviously won’t happen for a competitive keyword, but for a long-tail keyword it is very possible). You do some work on your new site, you build some backlinks and suddenly, one week later the site shows up somewhere around position 100.

That’s typically a sign that your site got sandboxed. For certain keywords it seems like that a new site gets sandboxed immediately, right after its launch.

Now, what are the reasons for a new site getting sandboxed?

As I already mentioned, no one knows exactly, but here are some of the reasons that seem to trigger the sandboxing effect:

* Building too many links too quickly.

* All backlinks are coming from one single source – for example, all backlinks are from social bookmarking sites.

* The site contains too much duplicate content. This may happen if content is pulled in from RSS feeds.

* There is a lack of anchor text variation – this happens if the exact same keyword is used for all backlink anchor texts.

* And as I already mentioned, it seems like certain keywords that are highly competitive or that belong to a certain niche automatically trigger the sandbox effect.

Once your site has been sandboxed, there isn’t really a lot you can do to get out of it within a few days or weeks. Just be patient and wait. Create unique content and build quality backlinks. Most sites are trapped in the sandbox for about 4-8 months.

So, it can happen that your site is stuck at position 100 for several months and then suddenly it moves onto Google’s top 10.