Google says sandbox exists, sorta

From SEOMoz (hat tip: threadwatch) comes the first real instance in which a Google employee has strayed from the Google line that there is no Google Sandbox.

I asked him [not Cutts, but a different Googler] what Google internally called the sandbox. He doged my question fastidiously until saying that he would try to get the spam team to adopt our term, “sandbox”, so we could all call it the same thing. I asked him if they would continue using it and he said “definitely” or possibly “almost certainly”… He noted in words I cannot remember exactly that they felt it was having a remarkable effect on the quality of the index. We moved on to other subjects after this, but not before he was vehement in explaining to me specifically that they did not design it to affect “all new websites”, but that a “filter must be tripped” for a site to be “boxed”.

I can vouch for the last statement in there. I’ve personally seen new sites rank out of the gate in Google. The most common explanation seems to be an unnatural gain in links for new sites. Though I’m more inclined to vouch for topical links rather than sheer number.