Google Sandbox in action?

Sometimes it’s hard to use a good example of the Google Sandbox in action, without the danger of exposing clients to unnecessary publicity.

This looks like it could be a good example, though: link condom

After the introduction of nofollow, the humour site www.linkcondom.com was set up to parody the concept of nofollow.

However, if you search for “link condom” on Google, the domain is nowhere to be seen.

Yahoo! and MSN both show the correct first result.

The domain www.linkcondom.com is a PR5, shows up on a search for itself, so it doesn’t look like a manual ban or PR0 penalty.

What it does have against it are that it’s a relatively new domain (less than a year old), and has lots of links to itself for just that anchor text.

Of course, it may not be a sandboxing process in itself - perhaps Google flags all the repetitive anchor text as indicative of spam - even though the site is linked from a range of major sites.

Perhaps the site is even under a form of penalty I’m not familiar with (I don’t sail close to the wind enough to know all the different penalties Google may apply).

Either way, I do quite sympathise with Google and their need for anti-spam controls.

However, examples such as the above illustrate that Google’s anti-spam methods contribute irrelevancy to it’s search product - the core of the Google business model.