My Experience of the Sandbox Effect

Wow dude, great post as usual. Well documented. I'm starting to see similar results with one of my older sites. Hopefully things will go as well as they did for your site.
 
Thanks Micallef for this wonderful post. you just boosted my confidence. I had almost dropped idea of my new project after reading alot negetive, but now i will bounce back with more energy!!
 
It is often conjectured that the sandbox is a test to see if links continue to come in after serp removal. My experience speaks against this theory.

Can you elaborate more about sentence above? Do you mean we must ceased backlinks during serp removal?
 
you didnt write if u kept linking while those changes in serps hapopened or not
 
Update:

All the serp positions I quoted have been maintained with no further backlink building.

Can you elaborate more about sentence above? Do you mean we must ceased backlinks during serp removal?

When I entered the sandbox, I stopped building backlinks because I wanted to "limit the damage" supposedly caused by pointing spammy links at my site. I was not sure if I would ever come out of the sandbox, so I moved on to new projects.

If I were to start again from day 1, I would never stop building links until I achieved my goal. Had I kept linkbuilding during the sandbox period, the site would have emerged even stronger.
 
Thanks for your valuable experience.. I get it now. Just build links no matter what right?
 
i added 200 backlinks to my site in one day with anchor text "free credit report" , my site was #39 for that term.
2 days later my site is deep down burried under tons of other sites for the term. Any chances that my site will regain
its previous position for this term?

Is this only a temporary effect?. My site is not in sandbox. I can find it using site: and info: plus the site still ranks for
other terms that don't contain "credit report"

Thanks
 
Micaleff, thanks for sharing, this is very interesting and I have had similar experiences with different websites, so I am a strong believer that there is no sandbox effect.

If Google would penalize you for building too many or too spammy links, it would be so easy to wipe our your competition, so I really don't believe in the sandbox effect.

And what Micaleff describes I have seen with basically all my sites: first they rank instantly high, than they are pushed way back, then they are climbing up while bouncing back and forth and finally they are stabilizing somewhere on top.

I see similar results with each Adwords campaign: first you get the 'newbie bonus' and are ranked on top, and if you don't 'proof' that you are worth being there, Google pushes you back where you belong and you have to climb your way back up...
 
From what I have read, experimented and learned so far:

To get out of the sandbox:

1. Add fresh content to your website on a timely basis.
2. Add levels of trust to your website by getting links from relevant high quality websites during your sandbox period.
3. Add OBL to authority websites in your niche from your website. (This is very important IMO)
4. Mix them up! (Don't focus only on one method of link building)
 
Loved this thread. At the very beginning i was very scared to build links more than 100 a day. I think i should experiment all the points made in this thread.
 
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