Do you ever feel like your new site is stuck in PR quicksand? It may just be stuck in Google's sandbox. Like the Bermuda Triangle of SEO, the "sandbox" effect causes new sites (domains less than a year old) to enter the search engine results pages for a few weeks, then vanish without a trace. Although it's never been proven and many people still doubt its existence, most industry experts believe the "sandbox" is a filter in Google's algorithm that helps maintain the validity of PageRank by preventing new sites from gaining PR too quickly.

Time in the sandbox varies from site to site but you can expect the effects to last several months. It's been said that many of the sites that fall victim to the sandbox appear to be sites optimized for highly competitive keywords. If a site is trapped in the sandbox, its link exchange efforts are also affected. New reciprocal links are put on hold, some experts say, until Google can determine the value of those links. The site will not increase in ranking from backlinks until Google decides the links are good to go.

So what is a site owner to do? Well, if you've got lots of time on your hands, you could buy the domain a year in advance and give yourself time to set up relevant content and links from well-ranked sites - or even well-ranked pages of one of your other sites - before you officially launch your new site. But most of us don't have that kind of time...

In his blog, SEO Barry Schwartz of SERoundtable reported that former WebmasterWorld moderator Todd Friesen (better known as 'oilman') believes much of the sandbox effect is related to "temporal link analysis." According to Barry, Todd advised site owners to redirect to a new site from an already established domain name. For example, Todd says he puts his new content on a subdomain of a mature site, then links to the subdomain to increase its PageRank. (As members of the LinksMaster link exchange program already know, subdomains are viewed as individual sites by the search engines.) Once the subdomain has gained PR, he redirects it to the new domain. Those who attempt this strategy might also want to wait a while before participating in a link exchange or linking out to other sites.

Another theory is to go to Google and do a site: match by typing "site:www.yourdomain.com" where "yourdomain" is obviously replaced with your domain name. Click on the resulting link a few times a day. Again, this is just a theory and hasn't been proven to work.

Jakob Jelling, founder of SiteTube.com, says it's also been advised that if you participate in a link exchange, ask your link exchange partners to link to you first. This might reduce the time your site spends in the sandbox.

"Do not discontinue back linking," he says, "your rank will eventually appear."

To help boost your site's backlinks, join the LinksMaster link exchange program.