One of the most important factors in attracting visitors to your website is the ranking that your website has in the search engines. If you are ranked highly, more people will see your site. Usually, the first page in search results receives the bulk of the visitors. This is why the competition to have a high page rank is very competitive. Nowhere is it more important to rank highly than at the giant known as Google.



For quite sometime now, there have been conspiracy theorists that have made claims about Google's policies, and probably rightly so. One of the more debated policies is that of the mysterious "Google Sandbox" phenomenon. What this term refers to is the virtual waiting or "probationary" period that new sites seems to be placed in. When a website is created and asks for inclusion in a search engine, it usually takes some time to garner a ranking. The ranking is determined by several factors including back links and keyword-rich content. However, many people have noticed that the rankings come much quicker for other search engines such as Yahoo! or MSN.

Many people are concerned during this "sandbox" period that they should have a ranking at Google sooner. Google would say the reason they may not achieve this swiftly can be explained by the complex mathematical algorithms that Google uses for page ranking. They say that it can take months to gather data about all of the sites in a particular niche. Then after a period, the mathematical formulas determine which sites should be ranked and in which order.

Whilst this explanation of a complex Google system may be accepted by some, others think that it is simply another one of the policies they use to "throw their weight around". Of course it is possible that Google is waiting to see if the page is just another junk site that is just trying to make some quick money on AdSense. If this is the case, then when this happens, Google simply weeds out the bad sites before mistakenly giving them a high ranking.

One thing for certain is that Google places great emphasis on keyword relevance, and whether the keywords used match the wording in ones ads, and also the relevance of the landing page used. A lot of "Newbies" can get this initially wrong, and as a result may be quickly slammed by Google, by having keywords de-activated and being asked to pay ridiculously high bids to have the words re-activated. In order to court Google successfully therefore relevant quality content is a must, in order to steer your way upwards through the sandbox effect, and ultimately make money online.

Whilst no one except Google really knows the answer, it seems that the existence of the supposed Google Sandbox is probably true. In this case the best and most viable solution on ways to get through it as quickly and painlessly as possible, is by following Googles own Guidelines in providing excellent quality of content through both paid and organic traffic. Although new webmasters may not like it, this may in fact be the best way to prevent spam websites from growing in populariy and trying to clean up some of the junk Many however still believe It is really Google imposing their will on the internet, and laying down their laws to us other mere mortals struggling to make money online.

In conclusion then, if webmasters are churning out quality content on a regular basis, the rankings from Google will come, and they will succeed in making money online. Google tends to reward content much more so than a flash-in-the-pan website that doesn't offer anything of value. The only thing to do therefore, is to stay the course and keep writing quality material.