Google Waiting Period (Sandbox) Case Study...

I bought an expired domain (registered in 2012, formerly a mom healthy blog with 12 blog posts), and re branded it for my niche (also health related). I loaded the site with 2000 words of content on homepage, and all the legal pages, dripped social signals, and created 50 different social media profiles for the site.

Started link building on October 20th 2015 with 5000 dripped high PR blog comments, and 200 super high TF (TF 30-60)/PR4-7 SAPE English only, US hosted homepage links. Diversified anchor text so none of my keywords are above 5%.



As of today, my site is indexed, not penalized, and does show up for super long tail keywords (aka searching my title shows up #1), but it is still nowhere to be found in rankings.

Im wondering, has anyone else tried to rank for an extremely competitive niche with super powerful links, and had to wait 2 months+ for rankings to start coming in? I don't want to abort this project too early....

Well I haven't done it lately, but a couple years ago I took a brand new site and ranked it first page for dozens of product review related keywords in a niche. It took about 4 months if I remember right. But things have changed a lot since then. I wouldn't be shocked if you needed 6 months to rank well now. And the truth is, Google probably doesn't unleash a domain's full power until its two years old. That used to be the word on the street WAY back in the day, at least. And given how Google is even more strict with things these days I wouldn't be shocked if it did take two years to get a domain's FULL age authority unleashed. Don't confuse this with being able to rank, however.

Did you check the domain for past anchor texts and if there was any Chinese content in the past. Are you sure there are no ugg boots or other spammy backlinks in the past and that it was never a Chinese site etc. in between. Did you check Majestic, Ahrefs, Archive.org and Screenshots.com to be sure it was not a spammy domain in the past? As a popular expired domain seller as well as user, I have seen many domains with good stats returning back to competitive rankings within days of building the website. If it is a super competitive niche, it is definitely not going to be easy especially if the past backlinks are not niche related.

It also depends on Google.com or regional Google SE. I have ranked very competitive ketwords to top 5 in Google regional (some Europoean country for a hint) within a week of it being built up.

The links you are creating are more of Tier 2 or rather Tier 3 or Tier 4 quality too. This might give negative results in the long run too. If the domain was already powerful, I would have built a few PBN links and social signals and wait for results before going further instead of blasting tons of links especially comments to my domain/site.

I've always wondered why Google doesn't just ignore a domain's past spammy links after the domain's website and ownership has clearly died off and the site had changed hands. If you think about it, over the next 25 years EVERY POSSIBLE domain name will have been owned and spammed at some point in time. It makes sense to me that Google would just simply ignore links that a domain got in its past lives rather than either poison a domain or make a domain attractive to blackhat for free links. Google has really caused their own problem there.

The reason is simple. Who would decide that the link was build today or in 2013? If the domain got dropped in 28 December 2014 and again got registered in 4th January 2015, how would Google be able to detect if the backlinks were built before it was dropped or by the new owner. What if the backlink was built by the old owner before the drop and then the link got indexed (detected by Google) after it was registered by the new owner? Google is just a shitty search engine and they are almost helpless with their algos (their support representatives have literally told me on phone and via email that in reality when I had filed complaint about a wrong local listing for a client's business in their SE). They literally told me that they cannot manually change their rankings even if it results in mental harassment of the business and loss of reputation due to their algo mistakes. So, if their algos are not even that smart to show proper results (and they cannot manually change it too), how on earth do you expect them to detect if backlinks were creating at x date or y date. That is logically impossible to predict for even humans leave apart algos and bots. Unless they stop counting and depending on backlinks as a whole, the value of links (or negative effect of bad ones) are going to remain for the foreseeable future.

ThopHayt said:

I've always wondered why Google doesn't just ignore a domain's past spammy links after the domain's website and ownership has clearly died off and the site had changed hands. If you think about it, over the next 25 years EVERY POSSIBLE domain name will have been owned and spammed at some point in time. It makes sense to me that Google would just simply ignore links that a domain got in its past lives rather than either poison a domain or make a domain attractive to blackhat for free links. Google has really caused their own problem there.

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My domain has been clean since the previous owner registered it in 2012. I actually loaded all of the original content, and theme, even kept the same about us page and stuff. Did a dupe content search beforehand to ensure the previous owner didn't transfer to a new site. I guess i'll just keep paying $100 a week for my sape links and hope at some point it starts ranking.

with 5000 dripped high PR blog comments,

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Sounds like that negative seo on my site

you need to blast the contentxual backlinks with GSA ser, other type of backlinks are wasting of time, don't care about the history of the expired domains, that doesn't matter.

"extremely competitive niche"

You have at least 4 months to burn.

You site should be ranking somewhere in the top 200 by now tho.

sashilover said:

you need to blast the contentxual backlinks with GSA ser, other type of backlinks are wasting of time, don't care about the history of the expired domains, that doesn't matter.

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But GSA too much backlinks. I used GSA but I found that Almost the sites being broken down. So We should use it by the quality websites.

Well its kinda happen to one of my website but the only difference is its not an expired domain. first time registered brand name. All pages index has the best link profile and anchor text diversity in my website portfolio but still not ranked for any keywords yet. I guess i will wait couple of more months and work on other projects. Give it sometime all the links that you build needs indexing and have to be picked by crawlers.

How much content you have on that website now ? And how many of them is new ?

5000 high pr blog comments is nothing but calling for disaster. Unless you found 5000 really good ones which I highly doubt !

This is not a typical case study thread, misleading title

"I spammed the shit out of my site and it still doesn't rank!"

Brilliant case study, thanks for sharing this lesson with us.

TheSEOWizard said:

So, if their algos are not even that smart to show proper results (and they cannot manually change it too), how on earth do you expect them to detect if backlinks were creating at x date or y date.

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Wouldn't it be as simple as giving each backlink they crawl a "first indexed on" date. Then as Google watches domains drop/expire, all they have to do is attempt to make a time-stamp every time a domain is dropped/expired. Then they go through the domains backlinks and see how many of those links have an "first indexed on" date that is OLDER than the domain's new ownership.

I'm not saying Google DOES this, but I'm saying it seems as if they at least have access to enough data to do this if they had wanted to. I say this because doing this wouldn't require anything manual, it would just require them applying data they already have to their algo. Its not a whole lot more advanced than "sandboxing" a new domain until its "aged" or how Google gives old backlinks more value than brand new backlinks.

5000 blog comment backlinks straight to your money site? That's a huge no-no, but the deed is done. I bet you'd be ranking by now if you had only built sape links.

ThopHayt said:

Wouldn't it be as simple as giving each backlink they crawl a "first indexed on" date. Then as Google watches domains drop/expire, all they have to do is attempt to make a time-stamp every time a domain is dropped/expired. Then they go through the domains backlinks and see how many of those links have an "first indexed on" date that is OLDER than the domain's new ownership.

I'm not saying Google DOES this, but I'm saying it seems as if they at least have access to enough data to do this if they had wanted to. I say this because doing this wouldn't require anything manual, it would just require them applying data they already have to their algo. Its not a whole lot more advanced than "sandboxing" a new domain until its "aged" or how Google gives old backlinks more value than brand new backlinks.

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The reason Google can't really do that is there are tons of legitimate reasons for a website to come back from the dead. It happens pretty often.

I buy a lot of domains, and I sometimes get requests from the previous owners to buy it back (with proof of previous ownership and all). Some people miss the emails, other time a company (or more often, an organization) lays off the tech guy who was getting the emails and doesnt realize their old domain has expired (when they change the name, and just redirect the old one)... point being - it does happen, pretty often, so Google can't null out all those backlinks where domains have been expired and rebuilt.