I am trying to think what is the best way to go about link building for a site with a large number of location pages. I have 300 pages and wondering should I drop random links on those 300 pages or just focus on building the links to the homepage.
If the 300 pages are linked directly to the homepage point most of the backlinks to the homepage so that the link juice flows from the homepage into each inner page. But don't point every single backlink that you have to the homepage only, this looks very unnatural and google might tank your site, point 20-30% of the links to the harder to rank / more important location pages...
If the 300 pages are split into good silos (categories), point 30-40% of the links to the homepage and split the other 60-70% between the categories, but make sure that the silos allow for the free flowing of the link juice between the pages in their respective silo (ie. don't nofollow / noindex the category pages, or any of the 300 local pages)
If i do random pages then none of the pages really have much power at all,
how so? If you silo your site properly and don't nofollow the silos you're going to get the "power" (assuming that the links are good, of course)
but if i do the homepage only then i can build the domain stronger which might equally help all the site.
true! But make sure you don't point 100% of the backlinks to the homepage or you'll get flagged as link builder and we know how much google "loves" link builders
Throw a few links to other important pages like "our services" (if you have such a page), or to any of the 300 inner pages (I'd pick 4-5 that are more important / harder to rank and throw a few links at each one of them)
Also I'm stuck badly in sandbox for 6 weeks now.... how long before one might escape this?
sandboxes can last anywhere from few weeks to few years, each sandbox is different and I noticed that it usually depends on the niche (ie. if you're in a tough niche like banking, lawyers, SEO, health & fitness, forex, insurance, luxury resorts, obesity surgery, education & scholarships, etc. it might take 1-2 years to get out of the sandbox... but if you're in less important / less profitable niches like... I don't know... arts, crafts, and hobbies, generally speaking... or outdoors, entertainment, some niches of the tech and science industries, even the pets niches are sometimes easy to approach, etc. then you might get out of the sandbox in 3-6 months)
But anyway, how do you know it's a sandbox and not a google penalty? Did you use to rank before for an extended period of time (over a month, for example), or is this a fresh new site that never ranked before? Because if it's a fresh site (less than 1 month old, for example) and never ranked before then yeah, it's probably sandboxed. But if it did rank before but not anymore then it's most likely a google penalty, either you've been affected by one of google's billions of updates of the last 3 years, or you've done something that google didn't like that could have triggered a mild penalty...
