This one might have been obvious for many people, but it just hit me today! I don't want to start a fight on this, I was just wondering if all of you ever saw it that way about the Sandbox. There are some days that you know that you are just too close to data to really be able to find what you are searching for. Our company just hired a director to develop the French market in Europe, and he comes from a traditional computer background, but has a lot of generic IT experience, being 46 years old. He was an IT project manager at one of the French companies we work for in France, but his contract is now over and he blogs with us on Go-Référencement.org, SEOmoz's French outpost.

We were chatting about the new domain we had bought 3 months ago that was clearly sandboxed. He was frustrated, and I was telling him about the fact that Google has to preserve some relevance by sending most of the new domains into a purgatory. But he wasn't satisfied with my answer. He kept wondering: why is that? Why does Google really sandbox websites? Can't they just figure it out, even if a domain is new, that it is spam-oriented or not?

Then, he started looking at all the money we had spent in Adwords in the past 2-3 months... He then came to a conclusion that surprised me. He created a funny correlation based upon the fact you are most probably sandboxed if you buy a new domain. The correlation is:

"Any newcomer on the search engine market willing to use Google as a revenue-driven source of traffic will absolutely require starting with a PPC campaign if he wants to show up for its main keywords."

I guess the next step could be saying: is the Sandbox a marketing tool from Google to promote its Adwords / Adsense program? The marketing tactic is smart: it gets you used to delivering rather stable results at measurable/predictable costs. What do you think? If I were them, I think I'd be thinking of such tactics to ensure a better conversion rate of my ads system...

French version of this article: http://www.go-referencement.org/google/le-corollaire-du-theoreme-du-sandbox.html