Has anyone been able to break into top 5 recently?

I've got 5 different sites in 5 different niches stuck on page 2 for the last 3 months.

I've consistently sent high pr links to these sites every month yet I'm only seeing very little movement (e.g moving up 1 position or moving down 1 position)

I've even sent around 50 homepage contextual links to these sites yet they're still stuck.

The competition for my keywords are very very low, so I've got no idea why I can't even break onto the 1st page.

I know there's a 30-day sandbox but I've been building links to these sites for over 3 months.

My question is, recently (in the past 3 months) has anyone been ranking in the top 5 positions?

yes i've been ranking into top 3# in the last few months.

Perhaps the competition is stronger than you think
It all depends on the keywords. So generally asking if others have come into the top 5 can get you misleading answers, as you don't know what their keywords are.

I have done some dramatic change with social signal and some very light link building breaking into top 3 for 1300 searches ! recently in 20 days !

I optimized my site well enough with good content and lot of LSI keyword articles.
and getting social signal on all pages in the website with some light link building with my primary top 3 keywords

they are medium competitive keywords

what do you mean by high pr links ? pr=2+ and da=20+ ?

-=-

have you tried to analyze your competition? use ahrefs to check what kind of links the guys in the top 5 are using. no need to reinvent the wheel.

different niches require different tactics. some niches can be cracked using web2.0 tiered linking, some with a redirect of mass spam blog comments, some require sape, some need 2million links in 2 weeks.

do what the top 5 are doing, just do it better.

glhf