Google, one of the Internet's most commonly used search engine, has a little known feature that can affect where your website is ranked among its pages. The Google Sandbox is supposedly acting as a ?probation officer? for new websites, keeping spam websites from growing too quickly before getting banned and then being resurrected.

It is believed that the probation period for the websites is somewhere between ninety and one hundred twenty days. Unfortunately, the biggest problem with the Google sandbox is that website keywords don't always show up in Google searches and causes the site to less than optimal traffic and links regardless of the quality of the content.

The Google sandbox was initiated in an effort to weed out spamming websites and to keep them from adding their own bought links. It was to also keep them from getting ranked too high on the pages, thereby cluttering up the search engine. Sites that had too many links pointing back to it has been labeled as suspicious by Google, and summarily banned.

Some sites even used nefarious tactics to rise to the top of the search results, thereby violating Google's Terms of Services, and being banned. The problem that occurred was that within a short period of time, these sites would reappear and the entire process of rising to the top and being banned started all over again. Hence the need for a ?probation officer?.

Back in March of 2004, website owners began to notice that websites launched after this date didn't rank very high in the ratings even though they used optimization techniques and had strong incoming links.

It has been speculated that the Google sandbox doesn't really exist, but the company has all but come out and admitted that they are using this filter. Websites that were launched prior to the implementation of the filter have probably never been reviewed the by the filter.

Sites with competitive keywords and phrases are at the most risk for spending some time under the sandbox scrutiny. If an owner does a keyword search for their site and doesn't see it in the most important searches, then their site is probably in the sandbox. If the owner does not see their site when they secondary keyword searches, and it has no page rank whatsoever, their site may be suffering a penalty imposed on them by Google.

While joining Google programs ? such as AdWords or Adsense ? will help drive traffic to the websites while they are in the sandbox, it will not help the site get free of the filter any sooner or keep from being scrutinized in the first place. There is no way to get free of the Google sandbox until the probation period is over. Website owners, however, are not entirely helpless during this time.

While their site is in the sandbox, they can add new incoming links to the site, fix up and continue optimizing the content, and even launching the site unfinished. By doing that, their site will no longer be under scrutiny by the time it is completely live. Owners may find that their page rankings are still weaker then expected, but this will change as they continue to tweak their content and allow other users to search for and find their page.

While the Google sandbox may seem to be a hindrance, it is, in reality, a positive tool. By putting websites on probation in an effort to stem the tide of spamming sites and eliminating them when found, the sandbox is actually giving legitimate live sites a chance to flourish instead of being buried by fakes.