This is reproduced in whole with permission from an aspiring BH, MORO, who contacted Vanessa Fox (from Google) about the hypothetical sandbox. Here are the original emails.

MORO:

I was wondering if there’s an authoritative resource you could point me to that explains the Google Sandbox. I’m under the impression that a newly registered domain can rank for competitive terms within the first couple weeks of indexation as long as the site attains an authoritative backlink or two. Assuming that the site is of high quality and entirely spam-free, am I under the right impression?

I’m asking because the site in question is going to be the redesigned version of another site that currently sits on a ranking domain. So to further the question, would 301ing the old domain (that has a PR2 and
ranks for competitive terms) to the new domain (newly registered) help the new domain to bypass any sandbox effects?

Vanessa Fox (from Google Sitemaps Team):

I know there are a lot of articles on the web about different people’s ideas about this hypothetical sandbox, as well as lots of posts on places like webmasterworld. However, we don’t have a sandbox as people tend to think. It’s much more as you describe. There are many factors that go into ranking for competitive terms, and it just tends to take newer sites a while to build up those things (I talked about this a bit on my blog actually, in terms of how it ranks for various terms, since it’s so new).

Some things that can help a site rank well that tend to build up over time include -lots of valuable content for the desired terms and high quality links.

I would definitely 301 the old domain to the new domain. That will help transfer the links from the old to the new and will prevent and duplicate content issues (if we find two sites with the same content, we tend to show only one of the pages in the search results and the older page is likely to be the one we show since it likely will have more incoming links and higher PageRank).

So, for new sites, get a number of high-quality links and you can rank for competitive terms. Hmmm… I think I might move this future post forward: Channelling PR from Trusted Sites