Originally Posted by junction

The Sandbox (a.k.a. Sandboxing or the sandbox effect or the Google penalty) is a name given to an observation about the way Google ranks web pages in its index. It is the subject of much debate—its existence has been written about but not confirmed and several observers state that they have observed the contrary.

According to the sandbox effect, Google temporarily reduces the page rank of new domains, placing them into what is referred to as its "sandbox", in an effort to counter the ways that search engine optimizers attempt to manipulate Google's page ranking by creating lots of inbound links to a new web site from other web sites that they own.