What is it? Does it still exist? Did it ever exist?
From what I can tell, if it does exist, the sandbox is an area that new domains are placed by the Google Search until they prove themselves worthy of better search results. While in the sandbox, you may notice that your site will only show for keywords which are not competitive. I haven’t found anywhere that explains how you get out of the sandbox, other then keep the site active for an undetermined amount of time. Here’s an interesting blurb from Wikipedia:
Those who believe the sandbox exists observe that it can sometimes take up to a year or longer for a website to be promoted from the Google sandbox, while those who do not believe in a sandbox explain this duration as simply the time it takes for Google to calculate PageRank using an “eigenpairs interpretation of nodes”.
All three of the questions don’t appear to have a clear-cut answer. The existence of this “Sandbox” has been disputed time and time again.
#1 by Jon Lee at March 17th, 2007
First time I’ve ever heard of the “sandbox”. I wouldn’t be surprised if something like that existed though – it’ll really help to maintain good search results.