Supercharged Backlink Experiment - Results so far

If your site is sandboxed, do not stop building links. You continuously build links and eventually when it comes out of sandbox you will be ranked high.

If you stop building links it is an indication that you are artificially building links.

sqhunter said:

Hey Mic,

so can be a more cautious strategy, to let your core domain untouched regarding any link explosions, and just make 2-3 strong web2.0 props + 2-3 Articles and have ONLY these directly link to your core domain.. but around these props built LW's pointing to the strong props and throw pr links, sb, comments and all other stuff to the props and the lw's ???

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That makes a lot of sense...im learning.

neo said:

If you stop building links it is an indication that you are artificially building links.

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Well said, in my eyes the sandbox is more of a test if you pass you come back stronger if you fail you are deindex. You just have to know what to do, and that's acting natural! So if you get sandboxed and then you completely stop building link you look unnatural and you fail. but if you keep building links and do the exact same things you were doing before you pass Of course it gets a little more complicated but that's the beginning of it.

I have been getting some interesting info recently regarding this.

A top SEO consultant has stated that it is common when link building to get sandboxed. The way that they gauge this is if they are not getting results even if they are searching for "websiteurl.com" or "companyname+location" and dont get on the first page for these terms (ones they were previously ranking for easily e.g. long tail). They stated it was a temporary effect and a side effect of link building.

From what I gather when sandboxed your site then receives some kind of review. I believe the review could potentially be a manual one which could explain the random timescales, we have also seen G recruit like crazy for manual quality testers previously? Also domains less than 6 months old are more vulnerable to this.

More and more my research points to aged domains being a very powerful factor indeed.

Also I have a friend that is tendering for an SEO (I was way too expensive for him, he is going mcdonalds prices lol) but in this process he spoke to one of the top SEO companies in Europe and he knows a little SEO and grilled them about their link building. They stated they aim for 15 links max per day in their link building activities.

In conclusion I think that the sandbox is bad news if a piece of sh1t site, autoblog etc. etc. or just temporary prob if you are white hat site with good content. Logically it can only be a really good thing if you pass this "test" IMHO.

Another tip I read here recently is to throw up sites like crazy then leave them to age a little bit before they start developing e.g. several months as many people have experienced working hard within 6 months and getting limited results.

From doing a ton of reading I am still not sure what a bulletproof amount of link building is but I believe it to be approx. 100 links per month for white hat sites. Another great tip was link building through services that approve your links to make look organic e.g. directories, commenting, emailing web masters etc. In theory you could go mental with directories and they will approve at different times anyways, some like DMOZ will take ages. Other advice I have gotten here over and over is to mix up the types of links e.g. directory, forum, comments, articles, videos, networking etc. etc.

I am not super experienced but hope this helps some ppl as I have been reading up like a fiend on some of this stuff.

Micallef said:

MichiganManiac, a while ago there was a thread where a lot of BHW members were asking "what will happen if I just hit a new domain with everything I've got?"

It's quite a common question. I'm just keeping a record here of what my results have been. When I first came to BHW, I thought there was too much speculation and not enough threads about what has actually happened when strategies have been followed, so that's what I'm trying to remedy.

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I know what you mean.
I'd like to see more threads like this with experiements
Hell I'd like to see more data being shared and conversation.
Funny how people will jump in to tell you what you have done wrong when you are experimenting specifically to test out results. Happened to me a couple times already lol.

Micallef said:

Another few weeks on, with additional high quality high PR links having been added, it looks like I'm in the "sandbox" to stay. Nobody can say when I'll emerge but it doesn't matter.

To those members who maintain that the sandbox does not exist, I agree. I am referring to it as an effect, not a cause. The cause is not clearly understood by anyone outside Google.

However, after this experiment I have a greater understanding, and therefore more power against Google.


This experiment was number 2 out of 3 that I have been conducting.

1) Any link, anywhere, anyhow, 3000 links in 12 weeks = down in SERPs

2) 58 Concentrated, powerful & clean links in 6 weeks = down in SERPs

3) Concentrated powerful links (not necessarily clean) into web 2.0 ----> into money site... I will post as I find out.

I appreciate your thoughts and I hope that others will post the results of their successes and failures so that others might learn.

Micallef.

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This is good solid info. Thanks

L0Ts of work here, I'd say skip the ping..

but is this experiment with pinging all or some ?

Some good info and I have read a lot here and doing some trials now.

From everything I learned so far it just takes time. If you want to do it fast, create lots of sites around your main site and push these hard. If they get sandboxed at least your main site is not off. You can push your main site slowly.

Even more interesting is to see what google domain you are targeting. At google.com 2 of my keywords are on nr 1 and nr 2. This is a german domain. On google.de which most of my target customers will be using my position for the same keywords is only 11 and 16.

The keywords were pushed most on non german websites and directory listings. To get higher on google.de i will probably need some more links from .de domain also.

This means that google will also look at where the links are comming from. So if you target a specific country you might want to get more links from that country to.

A good example is angela who has lots of backlinks. On google.com she is 2. on google.co.uk she is 1 on google.nl she is 6th on google.de she is 14 on google.fr she is 12.

When you look at above placement it does mean that both the doamin local like de fr nl will help and also where the links are comming from.

This means that it's not all about getting massive links but from where and who. The sad thing is that most target google.com and very few can help you get high in .de .fr. .nl or the prices are to high.

I had presummed that all the different language versions of google ran off the same thing but just translated differently or kept each language to its own version of google.
bbob1970 on non english googles did a different english site rank higher then angela?

bbob1970 said:

Even more interesting is to see what google domain you are targeting. At google.com 2 of my keywords are on nr 1 and nr 2. This is a german domain. On google.de which most of my target customers will be using my position for the same keywords is only 11 and 16.

The keywords were pushed most on non german websites and directory listings. To get higher on google.de i will probably need some more links from .de domain also.

This means that google will also look at where the links are comming from. So if you target a specific country you might want to get more links from that country to.

A good example is angela who has lots of backlinks. On google.com she is 2. on google.co.uk she is 1 on google.nl she is 6th on google.de she is 14 on google.fr she is 12.

When you look at above placement it does mean that both the doamin local like de fr nl will help and also where the links are comming from.

This means that it's not all about getting massive links but from where and who. The sad thing is that most target google.com and very few can help you get high in .de .fr. .nl or the prices are to high.

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As far as I can see it is not only about the country the links are coming from. As far as I can see the language is important as well. That means google.de will prefer results where the page-language is German, google.fr will prefer pages in French.

If you want to rank high for an English website, you should [FONT=&quot]preferably [/FONT]look for links from English speaking websites etc.

MarcW said:

As far as I can see it is not only about the country the links are coming from. As far as I can see the language is important as well. That means google.de will prefer results where the page-language is German, google.fr will prefer pages in French.

If you want to rank high for an English website, you should [FONT=&quot]preferably [/FONT]look for links from English speaking websites etc.

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I think this is correct.

Based on big g translate / meta tags no doubt?

I know a way of avoiding the sandbox..BUY AN OLD DOMAIN!!

ANyway, thanks Micallef for trying this on a new domain and sharing the results, peace.

aliskorn said:

I know a way of avoiding the sandbox..BUY AN OLD DOMAIN!!

ANyway, thanks Micallef for trying this on a new domain and sharing the results, peace.

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I think - correct me if i'm wrong - in this thread we have two terms for sandboxing, many people assume "sandboxing" is when a new site is put into a holding area while, as said above, possibly mannually checked. And in the same thread there is also reference to a site that is having links build for it and pushing it up in the SERPS using link building techniques, perhars we should define the "sandbox" effect a little clearer?

One for new sites - Sandbox

One for old sites that have been flagged - ???

Just a thought.

Im subscribed..

Let us know the updates.. . Why dont u try your expirement on an aged domain?

seomedia said:

I think - correct me if i'm wrong - in this thread we have two terms for sandboxing, many people assume "sandboxing" is when a new site is put into a holding area while, as said above, possibly mannually checked. And in the same thread there is also reference to a site that is having links build for it and pushing it up in the SERPS using link building techniques, perhars we should define the "sandbox" effect a little clearer?

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The official definition of the sandbox effect is when a new site ranks comparatively well on Yahoo and MSN, but is nowhere to be found on Google. This usually happens after some form of linkbuilding effort, but not always.

It must be remembered that it is an effect, not a cause. Nobody can be sure what causes it. Equally, I do not believe that google has an official sandbox filter as such. It's most likely a compound effect of Google's increasingly complex and sophisticated ranking algorithm when dealing with new and untrusted sites.

Why dont u try your expirement on an aged domain?

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Oddly enough I am just starting such an experiment. I've got a PR3 from 1999 that I'm going to try and use to rank for marketable keywords. I'll optimise it first, then if it doesn't rank on its own, I'll add backlinks and report what I find out.

Update: 14 days after experiencing the drop in rankings described in the original post, some (but not all) of my subpages are back on page 1 for their target keywords. These are high competition keywords. I'll report if anything changes.

14 days is pretty fast to get out of the sandbox. Looks like your experiment is going well. Must be the fact that all your backlinks were high quality and non-spammy.

Micallef said:

MichiganManiac, a while ago there was a thread where a lot of BHW members were asking "what will happen if I just hit a new domain with everything I've got?"

It's quite a common question. I'm just keeping a record here of what my results have been. When I first came to BHW, I thought there was too much speculation and not enough threads about what has actually happened when strategies have been followed, so that's what I'm trying to remedy.

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That is something I have been wondering about too: "hitting it with everything I've got" to basically simulate a site going viral or going on the front page of a news site or something.

Keep the journal going.
Thanks,
~The Internet Viking~

The temporary "sandboxing" happens to me every time I start a linkbuilding campaign. My results always take a dip and then a weeks later come roaring back stronger than ever.

SEO/linkbuilding campaigns can be brutally discouraging. Just hang in there my friends.

I was temporarily sandboxed for my site. I requested an appeal through google services, don't know if it helped or not but 2-3 weeks later but site was appearing in the SERPs again. The OP said it took 14 days (2 weeks) so perhaps a 2-4 week period is a common "sandbox" time for new sites with an influx of links, but not necessarily spammy ones.