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[Bill]

Linkster, my opinion of Jil Whalen is similar to yours- that is, most of the stuff in her newsletter and website is just too obvious to be worth reading closely.

But, she's pretty conservative, and not usually wrong when it comes to basic technical stuff, so when she said "Hey, it looks like the new patent implies there is a sandbox after all...", well, I think that opinion is worth considering.

I myself haven't read the patent, and don't really plan to.

The "sandbox", if it exists or not, has never affected my bottom line. When I buy a domain my first step with it is to set up some basic themed content on it, and let it sit for a year to collect some age.

So, if there ever was a sandbox I would never know about it. I can't say I've ever seen it, don't have direct experience with it, and I've never measured it.

So I've been a "sandbox agnostic" - I don't care wether or not it might exist.

But here's what she says about it - it certainly sounds like she believes it exists:

"I wasn't surprised about the stuff in the patent that corresponded with Google's aging delay and its "sandbox" as I had already seen a lot of discussion on this. For those who aren't familiar with the aging delay and the sandbox, you'll want to note that there is a lot of disagreement over what causes a site to be thrown in the sandbox.

However, based on my own observations and the experiences of some
trusted SEO friends, it's my belief that the sandbox is basically a purgatory database where Google places certain URLs based on a variety of predetermined criteria. (Much of this is spelled out in the first part of the patent application.)

The aging delay, on the other hand, is actually a subset of the
sandbox. In other words, the aging delay is just *one* reason why a URL might get placed in the sandbox.

Basically, if you have a brand new domain/website, it will
automatically land in the sandbox regardless of anything that you do with it. Your new website will be stuck there for an unspecified period of time (averaging around 9 months these days) and it will not rank highly in Google for any keyword phrases that might bring it any decent traffic. Yes, it can sometimes rank highly for the company name, or the names of the people who run the company. It may also show up in Google for a few additional phrases that other sites are not focusing on within their content. But new domains will not show up in Google's natural results for even slightly competitive keyword phrases until they are removed from the sandbox.

Other reasons why a site might be placed in the sandbox go beyond the aging delay. Google's major algorithm upheavals such as the recent one dubbed "Bourbon" by the folks at WebmasterWorld, show all too clearly that old domains can also be placed in the sandbox, under the right (or in this case wrong) circumstances. Nobody can really say for sure what the criteria is, but Google's patent does give us some insight into what some of them might be."

Jil Whalen from the HighRankings newsletter