[CASE STUDY] Sandboxing your competition

I've seen many discussions about whether or not you can hurt your competitions SERPs with building certain types of backlinks, but couldn't really find a proper answer, so I did a test myself and would like to share the results with you:

A few specs. from the target:

Domain age: 9 years

Unchanged site content: 5+ years

Pages indexed: 15/15

Domain length: 4 characters (This probably doesn't matter, but it's a high quality domain name).

PR: 1

I didn't just look for a site and blast the shit out of it right away, I searched for 2 main keywords that they're targeting and loaded them into Market Samurai's rank tracker.

The only thing I did after that for the next 16 days, was clicking the "Update Rank Data" every 24 hours. I didn't build any links in that time period.

Here's the rank data an for each keyword during that 16 days and probably long before that too (I checked the rankings every day, they didn't change):

Keyword 1: Monthly local searches (exact): 4,900
Google results with exact keyword: 5M+
Rank: #3

Keyword 2: Monthly local searches (exact): 2,600
Google results with exact keyword: 4M+
Rank: #3

After I gathered enough data I started with the linkbuilding. This is what I did:

- 13k profile backlinks with spammy and unpleasant keywords as anchor text and pointing to the target's homepage.
- About 500 profile backlinks also with the same keywords as anchor text pointing to tier 1.
- Again 500 pointing to tier 3.
- Immediately after they were live I put them into my Lindexed acct. and got them crawled.
- I also created separate RSS feeds for all links.

Don't ask why I made the links in this way, it's just the way I chose to build them.

Ranking for the two keywords literally one day after the link building and to date:

Keyword 1 rank: Not in the top 1'000 eek

Keyword 2 rank: #54

I'm not saying that this is a definite answer to the question above, but I did manage to do it. And it's only been 6 days since the sanboxing, so it could still flip tomorrow, but I'll update the thread if anything changes.

Thanks for reading

lol, this is crazy!

Good info to know, thanks for sharing. I look forward to seeing what happens in a few days/weeks

what would have happened if you blasted the site using his own keywords... I wonder if the same would not happen for a while and then the site would go back to its "normal" place

lol.. good job. Seeing as they are spammy links, you think there would be any chance of a bounce back? Even if they start updating the content? (though I doubt that, as you said they haven't done so in a few years)

Either way. Thats funny. >_>

In for updates on the targets position.

ive always wondered this. im book marking this thread

nice test, thanks for the information.

look forward to see what happens with the site in the next few weeks.

moneyfreedom said:

Good info to know, thanks for sharing. I look forward to seeing what happens in a few days/weeks

Click to expand...

Subscribe to the thread, I'll keep you updated

pf69.com said:

what would have happened if you blasted the site using his own keywords... I wonder if the same would not happen for a while and then the site would go back to its "normal" place

Click to expand...

Yeah that would be interesting to know what would happen with the keywords as anchor text.

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Something unexpected came in my way just now, so I'll be gone for 2 hours or so, sorry.. If you have any questions post them now and I'll get back to you as soon as possible when I'm back.

theyll prob come back even stronger....

mdsurf said:

theyll prob come back even stronger....

Click to expand...

Yeah.. One last thing, spare me with posts like these. This is why I made this test.

Keep it up Swiss. My won Case study is showing that you can harm other sites quite easily. After several months the site is still nowhere to be found.

Google is going to be in serious trouble if the results of studies like this show you can damage competitors sites.

Myspace will be doing this too facebook now.




In they're dreams

intresting to see what happens over the next few weeks?
i did the same thing on my own site (sb/xrumer) direct to my homepage and got it sandboxed ... 4 months on .... still sandboxed.

domain was 10 years old.
pr3
i had just placed a new site design on this site and had loads of redirects.
also changed the ownership records of the domain so it would have looked to google that it was under new ownership!

updates please.

It is dancing and perhaps it will come back with better ranking.
Its my personal thinking and I respect all your comments. lets see what happens next.

Also please clarify, I have read many WSOs and asked many gurus about google sandbox. They say sandbox means complete de-index that the google thinks site ranking is not natural. And If the site is still in SERPS i.e site:site.com, it is actually dancing and not sandboxed.

Hope you have understood what I mean.

Swiss said:

After I gathered enough data I started with the linkbuilding. This is what I did:

- 13k profile backlinks with spammy and unpleasant keywords as anchor text and pointing to the target's homepage.
- About 500 profile backlinks also with the same keywords as anchor text pointing to tier 1.
- Again 500 pointing to tier 3.

Click to expand...

I'm not sure to understand: "13k profile"=tier 1, "500 profiles to tier 1"=tier 2 ?
Does it mean that you've created 13.000 x 500 X 500 = 325.000.000 BL ....????!!!

Interesting...subscribed!

I have actually been doing this awhile, just for local competing offline businesses. I use it like a bulldozer, push all the competitors out of the way. My competitors always wonder why my sites outrank theirs.

It doesn't matter the anchor text, as long as you dump too many links at once on to them.

I am subin for updates. There WILL be a bounce back but I think you might be onto something here.

How are you checking rankings?

Awesome case study. You should sell this as a service!