Is it real? Well with two of my websites that have just been submitted only the domain name is showing. What I mean by this is that normally the first page shows pretty quickly with the domain and the title text and googles cache underneath. But with these two only the domain is listed, nothing under it.

According to some forums Google changed an algorithm recently which effectively puts new websites on probation. They say that this explains why many people have seen Googlebot coming to their website every day but nothing is happening (this is the case with these two domains).

It seems also that the importance of page rank (PR) could soon be a thing of the past.
Here are some of the things that the new bot will look at in a negative light,

1) Red text - according to some sources google have recognised that a large amount of webmasters who have got very good at SEO use red text in sales pages (look at all the ebooks for sale) this may throw up a problem for your website if you over use it.

2) Excessive keyword cramming - this is not new but it seems now the standard rule of mentioning a keyword no more than 11 times on a page will reduce even further. Some webmasters are actually experimenting with a very few keywords on their pages

3) Too many inbound links. As you probably know the idea of exchange links with Google changed some time ago to inbound links being more important. In a nutshell this means it became more important to have your link on someone elses website without their link on yours. However some people over do this and get listed on hundreds of directories and shopping malls. Google it seems will now pick up on this and restrict sites that do this. So a few well written articles about your subject with links back to your website sent out to relative websites will gain you better positions I think.

4) While in the "sandbox" period don't just give up. If googlebot is coming to spider every day or so then it's looking for consistancy. Don't make radical changes in the hope it will pull you out of the sandbox. Keep adding to your website content and when you do come out your listing will be higher. How long does the "sand box" period last, who knows? but experts seems to say anywhere up to 6 months.

With all this in mind one thought to add. I reckon that ecommerce websites are not effected by the sandbox. We regsitered a shop website using a well respected ecommerce companies software whose framework seems to be recognised by Google. Within 3 days it was showing relative content for many keywords and products. So does Google like the fact that these ecommerce packages have a good structure etc, who knows, but we will now build in lots of static html pages around the shop to boost it even further.

Cheers all
Paul