Ranking Success - Avoiding the Sandbox

After some serious blackhat link building (comment spam), one of my new sites is finally ranking on page 1 for a number of competitive keywords, and starting to rake in some $. This is due to sheer force of backlinks built over 3 months (approx 500 ******** links + anchor text per sub page).

It's a privately hosted blog with affiliate posts on coupons & savings.

I know that at around this stage, there is a high risk of being sent back down to google hell, or the sandbox as it is sometimes called.

I would be grateful if anyone can provide their opinion on how to try and prevent this from happening.

The sandbox depends on a couple of things, like the rate of which your links appear... for example 10 one week, 500 the next, then 10 the week after will spell trouble.

Also if you are reported for link spamming, it could make you get sandboxed.

One of my trials involved this. I scraped as many links as I could with hrefer, then proceeded to take a new domain name, build a small site in 30 minutes, obfuscated the javascript with no meta info in the html and then ran the list on xrumer for about a week. It climbed to the top of the results (#1) and stayed for a couple weeks.

Out of the blue, it disappeared. One week later on page 2, then page 4 after two weeks, and one week after that is in the number one rank for those particular targeted keywords. It is still there to this day.

The only things going for that site are (keywords are in domain name) and massive xrumer link spam. Relative content, seo site design, hell even h1 tags are non-existent.

This is out of about 240,000 google results (not an extremely competitive area).

Page rank 0, but sites below mine are 3+ and seo quake for google is only indicating 2 links in. However a quick search of the url for the site lists 10 pages of links and yahoo indicates over 2,000 links.

Basically, it looks like google caught me, pulled my rank, discounted the links, then put me back at number 1...

I hope my experience will help you.

Amber0855, I very much like the way you made a site just to test!

I have been keeping my link building consistent. Anycase, your input makes me optimistic that sandboxing, if it does happen to me, may only be a temparary measure.

I think this has all been discussed elsewhere on BHW but here it is in a nutshell ...

I like to buy pre-existing domains as they're expiring. The older the better. They need to already be indexed, and if you see it has a lot of backlinks via Yahoo's siteexplorer, all the better.

Once you own the domain, re-create any individual pages that site-explorer shows having significant backlinks. Those are pre-existing freebies.

PR on the domain you're buying doesn't matter --- you'll build it with your techniques.

Why does this work? B/c Google tends to sandbox new domains. By buying a domain that's more than two years old, you're leapfrogging that factor. The domain is already indexed and may already have gone through a period of sandboxing. Stay under the radar, and it won't get de-indexed.

Also, if you can afford it and you think you can keep the domain profitable for the long-term, extend your registration for two years or more --- Google is biased against throwaway 1 year registrations.