Over the past year or so many in the search engine industry have been fervently discussing the theory of Google "sandboxing".

Sandboxing is a system by which new sites rank well for a short time, two to three weeks maybe, and then drop completely out of sight. A site is effectively placed on probation - placed in a sandbox where it can play away from the "older, bigger children". Although the new website will still show in the result pages, it will not rank well regardless of how much original, well optimised content and inbound links the site may have.

This can last for anything from six months to a year according to reports, bringing much frustration to site owners.

Until recently the theory had been just that - a theory. However, in the last month Google engineers have reportedly confirmed the fact at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, California. One such engineer reportedly said that new web sites are placed, "regardless of their merit, or lack thereof, in a sort of probationary category...to allow time to determine how users react to a new site, who links to it, etc".

The simple answer to this is to improve search results. As webmasters began to learn the intricacies of Google's search algorithms they became more adept at exploiting them to push their pages up the rankings. A spammer could set up a site that violated Google's policies with the knowledge that, even though the site would eventually be banned, it would create enough profits in the interim to justify its construction.

To combat this Google seems to have set up a trigger system that places a new site in the sandbox. As time passes, and legitimate sites pass spam filters that are run, they gain merit and are eventually set free to join established websites and climb the rankings ladder.

To easiest way to check if your site has been sandboxed on Google is to see if you rank well in all the other major search engines. If you show up on the others but do not show up at all in Google's rankings, you have probably been sandboxed. If, however, you do a search for your domain in Google and get no results for your website (and you had been previously listed), there is a chance that you have been banned.

It seems that almost all new sites are sandboxed by Google, and this is to be expected. It may at first be frustrating that you website is being held back, however smart site owners will use this to their advantage.

Google still treats your site in the same way using the quality of inbound links and the quality of content to judge a site's merits. Use this time then to improve the quality of your site.