Many new sites, or sites that have not been significantly developed, have a hard
time ranking right away on Google. Many well-known SEOs have stated that a
good way to get around this problem is to just buy old sites. Another option is to
place a site on a subdomain of a developed site, and after the site is developed and
well-indexed, 301 redirect the site to the new location.
The whole goal of the Sandbox concept is to put sites through a probationary
period until they prove they can be trusted.
There are only a few ways webmasters can get around the Sandbox concept:
• Buying an old site and ranking it
• Placing pages on a long-established, well-trusted domain (through
buying sites, renting full-page ads, paying for reviews, renting a folder,
or similar activity)
• Gaining a variety of natural high-quality links. When a real news story
spreads, some of the links come from news sites or other sites that are
highly trusted. Also note that when real news spreads, some of the
links will come from new web pages on established, trusted sites (new
news story and new blog posts). It is an unnatural pattern for all your
link popularity to come from pages that have existed for a long time,
especially if they are links that do not send direct traffic and are mostly
from low-trust sites.
• Participating in hyper-niche markets where it is easy to rank without
needing a large amount of well-trusted link popularity

Google & Authoritative Domains

Content on a new domain with limited authority will not rank as well as content on
a trusted domain name. Through 2006 Google placed significant weighting on
trusted authoritative domains. According to Hitwise and the NYT in November
of 2006, search provides roughly 22% of the web traffic to many newspaper
websites, with roughly 2/3 of that traffic coming from Google.
Google is not sending these newspapers so much more traffic because the
newspapers are doing SEO. They are sending more traffic for a variety of concrete
reasons:

Google wants to rank informational pages.
• Many of these newspapers are well trusted offline within their
communities.
• Newspapers have an informational bias and their articles consist of real
unique human written text.
• Google feels they can rely on long established businesses and sources
of power more than the average website.
The more your sites (or sections of them) look like a trusted newspaper, the easier
it is going to be to rank well in Google.
Various Data Centers
Google uses groups of data centers to process their search queries. When Google
updates algorithms or their refreshes their index, the changes roll from one data
center to the next. When results rapidly change back and forth, sometimes they are
tweaking algorithms, but more frequently you are getting search results from
different data centers. You can use the free Firefox ShowIP extension to find the
IP address of the data center of your search query.

About PageRank

PageRank is a measure of connectivity. It is a rough approximation of the odds
that a random web surfer will cross your page. PageRank is calculated by following
links throughout the web, and placing more weight on links from pages that many
quality pages link at.
The problem with PageRank is that most industries and most ideas are not
exceptionally important and well integrated into the web. This means that if
Google did place a heavy emphasis on PageRank, webmasters could simply buy or
rent a few high PageRank links from sites in a more important vertical and
dominate the search results for their niche topic. However, that is not how it
works.
PageRank (mentioned in The Anatomy of a Search Engine) as it relates to SEO is
overrated. By Google making the concept easy to see and understand, it allows
more people to talk about them and makes it easier for more people to explain
how search engines work using Google and PageRank as the vocabulary.
Google’s technology is not necessarily better/more effective than the technologies
owned by Yahoo!, MSN, or Ask, but they reinforce their market position by being
the default vocabulary. And, as they move on to more elegant and more
sophisticated technologies, many people are still using irrelevant outdated
marketing techniques.

Speculation
I mention a number of algorithms and concepts in the following section, including:
Hilltop, TrustRank, Topic-Sensitive PageRank, temporal analysis, and latent
semantic indexing (LSI).
Some of these algorithms may not be part of the current search environment, but
the ideas contained within them are still worth understanding to see where search
may be headed and what search topics search engineers think are important to
improve their overall relevancy scores.
Local Re-ranking Results Based on Inter-Connectivity
Hilltop
Hilltop was an algorithm that reorganizes search results based on an expert rating
system.
In the Hilltop white paper, they talk about how expert documents can be used to
help compute relevancy. An expert document is a non-affiliated page that links to
many related resources. If page A is related to page B and page B is related to page
C, then a connection between A and C is assumed.
Additionally, Hilltop states that it strongly considers page title and page headings in
relevancy scores; in fact, these elements can be considered as important as, or more
important than, link text. It is likely that Hilltop also considers the links pointing
into the page and site that your links come from.
The benefit of Hilltop over raw PageRank (Google) is that it is topic sensitive, and
is thus generally harder to manipulate than buying some random high-power offtopic
link. The benefits of Hilltop over topic distillation (the algorithm that powers
Ask.com, which will be discussed later) are that Hilltop is quicker and cheaper to
calculate and that it tends to have more broad coverage.
When Hilltop does not have enough expert sites, the feature can be turned off, and
results can be organized using a global popularity score, such as PageRank.
Google might be using Hilltop to help sort the relevancy for some of their search
results, but I also see some fairly competitive search queries where three of my sites
rank in the top eight results. On those three sites, it would be fairly obvious for
search engines to know that they were all owned by me.
They may use something like Hilltop to scrub the value of some nepotistic links,
but it will not wipe out all related sites just because they are related. When you
search for things like Microsoft, it makes sense that many of the most relevant
websites are owned by the same company.

Ranking Search Results by Reranking the Results Based on Local Inter-
Connectivity
That subheading probably sounds like a handful, but it is the name of a patent
Google filed. The patent is based on finding a good initial set of results (say the top
1,000 or so most relevant results) then reranking those results based on how well
sites are linked to from within that community.
If you have many links and have been mixing your anchor text but still can not
break into the top results, then you likely need to build links from some of the top
ranked results to boost your LocalRank. Just a few in community links can make a
big difference to where you rank. A site that has some authority but lacks the in
community links may get re-ranked to the bottom of the search results. A site that
has abundant authority, like Wikipedia, probably does not need many in
community links.

Temporal Analysis

Search engines can track how long things (sites, pages, links) have been in existence
and how quickly they change. They can track a huge amount of data such as