The 'Google Sandbox' is a special place where your website goes for the first 1 - 8 months of its existence on the web.
This 'special place' is far, far away from the first page of Google search engine listings.
Although, Google has not directly confirmed the existence of the 'sandbox', they have implied it and as search engine optimers - we know about the sandbox from our direct experience. It was created to discourage people from creating 'junky sites', with little or no content and using 'black-hat' seo techniques to push their way into the top of the listings.
The sandbox is mainly for new domains, if you have an old domain and are redesigning your website, you shouldn't have any problems. If you have a new domain you can to wait about 3-6 months from the time Google indexes your website, until the time you can get top rankings for your primary keywords.
How To 'Beat' The Google Sandbox
Just because your site will have to wait before it can achieve top listings for it's primary keywords, doesn't mean that you can't start to get top listings for your secondary keywords!
With a highly optimized website, you can start to get first-page listings on secondary, low-competition keywords. Although there won't probably won't be as much traffic from these keywords, any traffic is better than no traffic... Depending on your 'second-tier' keywords and your website structure, you may be able to obtain first page listings on multiple keywords on Google within a month...
The length of the sandbox can correlate with the value added to your website, such as the quality of your: content, incoming links and site architecture. Also, if your website is about a current topic that is in the news, you may be able to bypass the sandbox altogether.
(The 'sandbox' doesn't apply as strongly on Yahoo, MSN, and Alta-Vista)
