Linkbuildingblog has an excellent post on all that’s currently known about the Google Sandbox and how to beat it.  I’m certainly interested in that for www.artnewyorkcity.com, which was started less than 3 months ago on the Syntagma blog magazine (network) and still does not show PageRank (which is not unusual) - that’s part of the "sandbox" effect.  According to Andy Hagens this is how it all starts:

"The sandbox/Trustbox is a set of filters in Google’s search algorithm that together prevent new sites from ranking well until they gain trust. To gain perspective on this definition, you’ll need to understand the Link Algo Cycle™:"

"………Google decided to assume a new site didn’t deserve to rank until it proved it was trustworthy. (Note: when I use the term "site", it’s sort of interchangeable with "domain name"; Google is really sandboxing new domain names.)"

Sandbox Crawling was developed when the "Big Daddy" datacenter upgrade was installed earlier this year.

"From Matt Cutts

The sites that fit "no pages in Bigdaddy" criteria were sites where our algorithms had very low trust in the inlinks or the outlinks of that site. Examples that might cause that include excessive reciprocal links, linking to spammy neighborhoods on the web, or link buying/selling… Some folks that were doing a lot of reciprocal links might see less crawling. If your site has very few links where you’d be on the fringe of the crawl, then it’s relatively normal that changes in the crawl may change how much of your site we crawl."

"….. I can tell if it’s beginning to gain trust just based on how it’s crawled or indexed. Getting fully indexed is certainly not the same thing as beating the sandbox and ranking well, but it’s an indication that you’ve gained some trust and you’re on your way. "

Andy Hagen’s advice to beating the Sandbox effect is to build a good site with links to your new site from Ultra Trusted established sites.  Andy says you get out of the Sandbox in "stages" rather than all at once.  The rest of Andy Hagen’s post involves using Link Bait to build viral popularity in Digg and other places like that - things that have happened to me from time to time but are not that easy to do on a planned basis (no surprise to that).

The comments in Andy’s post are also interesting to read.