The Dreaded Google Sandbox - G penalties walkthrough

Actually hitting the front page for google on the first 2 weeks is a bad sign. Like being said here, it means that a site gets indexed and already have a large amount of backlinks.
Do things more slowly, just use placeholders, promote not too heavily and add some content.
After the site is "trusted" you can use other methods - white hat or blackhat.
The only sandbox I encountered with was when I tried to do things too quickly.
my 2 cc

I've found that getting too popular can be a problem. Once I had a site about a month old and a popular blogger liked something I wrote (think big like gawker only it wasn't them, a conversational type of blog). It was just some funny shit I wrote about stuff going on in my niche that was kind of scandalous that particular week.

Suddenly I had something like 1000 or more links back to my site from bloggers. My site was totally white hat, had about 20 pages of content in html when I launched, and I was adding about two pages a week of original handwritten content. Wasn't doing much to get backlinks at that point.

Well, Google favored me for about two weeks and then the next page rank update came along and that site ever since has been lost in the back pages - page ten and worse - for lots of keyphrases, including longtail shit that it should be number one for.

So I find that operating under the radar is kind of important even if you're totally white hate. Google appears to have a love/hate relationship with new sites that suddenly do something to get themselves noticed. Initially, you rank great for your keywords, then with the next PR update you get sandboxed or just "disfavored."

I dunno. Maybe it's only with established domains that you can handle that level of sudden popularity? I don't know. Mostly I just operate my little niche sites using the conduit method or selling my ebooks and reports now and as long as I build them slow and steady I'm making good money.

Dan

yep, a lot of backlinks on low authority sites to a site thats is less than a month old is a free ban, is like HEY GOOGEL!, BAN ME LOL!, srlsy

The sandbox is BS, you can launch a new domain and get +50k backlinks in a month and rank with the best of them. If there was some sandbox that said "New Domains Get Filtered" this wouldn't be possible.

Penalties though are very real and more common than people think, some are subtle like a -30 and most people don't even know and just think their rankings suck.

If you launch a domain, do the wrong things you will probably get filtered but if you do things right there's no reason you can't get good rankings on a new site.

that's not what I meant.

It's like ranking for the keywords for 2 months then a long wait for 4 months out of +100 then after an update in PR you magically went back in the top 10. O____O

I was raning on page two with my search term for 10 days then I started building backlinks by commenting blogs and boom not ranked for that keyword at all now im stuck on I dont know what to do mode.

they suggest to keep doing what you're doing till the next update of PR

google does that... i get sandoxed at times for no good reason... sometimes I get back to page 1 in a few days... sometimes it takes longer... some keywords don't get hit whilst others do... just have to ride the storm at times and play along...

Reading this thread I keep hearing about 1000 backinks in a week ans so forth. What is a safe speed to build backlinks. 10-30 a day perhaps. Also do you find the same snabox effect with web 2.0 properties such as squidoo and using a product like bookmarking demon? Thanks for your input.

cutts is the master of misinformation...

new domains often see an early "pop" before settling down the ranks. not uncommon really.

as for the speed of link building, depends on what kind of links you get. i'm sure if you made a startling breakthrough of some sort within the content of your site, and you were linked from thousands of news sites overnight, that'd be ok. but if you suddenly earned 1000s of links in a 24hour period from directories and/or SB sites, that might look suspect. especially if they all had the same anchor.

The real problem is too many links too quickly from too many crap sites - sub PR2 article directories and blog farms.

The best result I ever got from trackbacking was on a site where I happened to hit lucky and picked up backlinks from a number of PR4+ edu sites and those links stuck. On a brand new domain with squat in the way of content I was a PR4 on the first update and #1 for my chosen keyphrases!

That was just with a couple of hundred links in total and those few really good ones. I mentioned ArticleMarketer earlier - doing things like that with a new domain is like cutting your own throat. Thousands of garbage links too quickly on a new domain are just suicide.

Good site promotion should be like good sex - lots of setting the scene, then slow but sure and finally hitting the really good stuff at the end.

The good ol' sandbox. It feels nice when it's finally over.

I have a domain which was a few years old and didn't do any optimization or anything blackhat. It was just a place to dump my stuff. (old webpages that I've created over the years)

I decided to change it's focus on the keyword travel guide. Specifically about Florida travel. My keywords were the actual locations in Florida.


I created 50 totally unique pages about a Florida place with original photos, text, movie and Google map locations, etc. Optimized them all perfectly. (didn't use Wordpress so i could put the keyword location in the URL, keyword in Title tags, keyword H1 tags, LSI words all over the place, alt tags got keywords, etc. etc.)

Google indexed the sitemap file and I confirmed all my pages were indexed.

None of my pages ranked anywhere for 6-7 months.

Now I show up on page 2 or 3 for each of my obscure keyword locations. Didn't do ANYTHING. (not even link building) I got the rankings from SEO alone - but after that time period of being in the sandbox.

To give an example: there's a restaurant called Havanna Cafe on Chokoloskee Island that doesn't even HAVE a website. I built a nicely optimized page about them. 7 months later my webpage on the Havanna Cafe appears on the first page of Google. Never did a link or anything for that page. (why should I?) I'll take my sand wet please.