Despite Google's statements to the contrary, many website owners still believe in the existence of the Google sandbox. According to this theory, new sites discovered by Google's crawlers are always placed in a special "sandbox" separate from the main Google index. Sites in this sandbox are kept out of the main index -- and the search results pages -- until the next major update of the Google index, which could be months away. Domains that are already out of the sandbox are therefore perceived as being more valuable to own.

Google's official line, however, is that the sandbox has never existed. A recent search engine optimization (SEO) contest, the Redscowl Bluesingsky Contest, has proven them correct. Sponsored by SEOlogs.com (see http://www.seologs.com/contest.html), this contest revolves around a made-up phrase previously not found in the Google index, "Redscowl Bluesingsky". Webmasters had 62 days to get a page with that phrase into Google's index. The winner would be the page ranking #1 on the most of Google's data centers (because Google results are served from several different locations across the globe) at the end of the contest period.

The key rule in the contest, however, was that only new domains registered at or after the start of the contest could qualify. If the sandbox truly existed, then, it would stand to reason that none of these sites would make it into Google's index during the contest period. But that wasn't the case. Almost immediately, a number of domain names incorporating "redscowl" and "bluesingsky" were registered in various top-level domains and immediately made there way into the Google index. Using keywords in a domain name is a well-known SEO technique for associating a website with those keywords, and many contestants took advantage of this fact.

Some contestants, however, managed to get their pages to rank highly without including the keywords in the domain name. The "Redscowl Bluesingsky or Redscowl-Bluesingsky?" page at http://www.cluelessabout.com/redscowl%20bluesingsky.html is one example that uses standard SEO techniques to rank well for its chosen keywords, including using the keywords in:

* the name of the page;

* the page title;

* bolded text;

* headings;

* links within the site; and

* links from other sites.

(It should be noted that most of the other contestants also used these techniques to great advantage in addition to using the keywords in their domain names.)

What this contest shows, then, is that new sites are not automatically sandboxed by Google just because they're new. Any site that isn't in the index is being filtered for some reason related to the quality of the site's content. More than likely, the site's done something that raises a number of red flags within Google's indexing process.

The conclusion you can draw from this? Study the top-ranked entries in the contest and see what the SEO experts have done to ensure that their sites don't get filtered out of the Google index. And be sure to read and understand Google's Webmaster Guidelines (http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html). Play by the rules to ensure Google indexes your site and you reap the benefits of that indexing.