I have been doing SEO for about 10 years now...However, most of the time I never pushed a brand spanking new domain. What i did was launch a new site, do as much on-site SEO as I can, and get backlinks, perhaps getting too many backlinks. This first week my site was receiving about 1,500 uniques a day...I was thrilled, then it all dissapeared, every possible search term, I was nowhere to be found even though my websites content was much more elevant than the top 20+ listings...I dropped to the END OF SERPS for every search phrase except for one search phrase...I only dropped a page...but that was the search phrase I was building backlinks for using that anchor text. So I want to know what everyones opinion and experiences are on this...Its nice to know you can be sandboxed, but still have the ability to come out of that sandbox for anchored backlinks.
Most likely this happened either because you linked TO a bad neighborhood on your site or you were building inbound links too quickly. If its the latter, you can wait it out and it will eventually resolve itself as the links become better aged. You might also want to concentrate on getting better, more targeted inbound links as these usually only add to your cause.
well, this obviously happened for building too many backlinks too quickly, and I know this is most likely a temporary situation, but what i found interesting is that i didnt get "penalized" for the actual anchor term I was getting backlinks for, at least not to the same extent as everything else.
Sandbox phenomenon can be a bit mystic sometimes... Usually if you are getting good links to quickly and then in the same time span nearly nothing ... then you are at risk! When a site is less than a year old, I tend to be careful and I try to be smooth with the links For instance with directories, I won't massively register at the beginning, only a few per/day (or even per week ...). Then, if you found links of quality which are related to your content, the even if the trafic from SE dropped, you're still having directly targeted trafic. I would focus on that, I was to be sandboxed. Sandboxing can long though. Hope for you, you won't stay too long in the dark
I agree with souther and brinker. The linkbuikding must look natural: add 1-4 links each day and you should be fine.
Quick gain of backlinks can cause big damage. On sunday, I had an additional 12k backlinks get indexed, and when that happened, bam, was removed of Google.
Can I throw an idea out? I've actually noticed this phenomenon with one of my sites. I'm starting to believe that google looks collectively at the "average" age of yours links. I have a 2 year old site with about 2500 links targeting very competitive keywords. I started to aggressively add new links. I added about 400 links within in 1 month and noticed a drop in rankings across the board; however, I did bound back with even stronger rankings after 3 weeks. I do believe that consistency is more important in link building. If you're averaging 20 links a month for 6 months then adding 1000 links on the 7 month would raise a flag.
Yes, your correct in what you said, but a better answer would be that the rate of backlinks your getting should always stat constant. If your gaining 10k backlinks every month, then make sure you keep up with that amount and not go over it. Google will understand that its natural links if your getting an average of 10k new backlinks every month, but if you suddenly raise to 30k backlinks in additional in a month, then that may cause some down side, unless you are going to keep getting an additional 30k backlinks a month from that point.
Same exact thing happened to me. All my rankings dropped significantly except for the keyword which was in all of the anchor text of most of the backlinks. I had my site ranked in the top 10 for at least 5 keywords literally overnight in Google. Than only 24 hours later my ranking tanked to page 10 for all my terms except for the one keyword that I was primarily optimizing for. This was most likely due to the fact that I received too many sitewide links. I think a lot of sitewide backlinks in too short a period of time, and especially if your site is new, can severely affect your rankings. I've also heard that extremely highly relevant, high PR links can pull you out of the sandbox quicker--focusing on quality instead of quantity is key, especially in the beginning of your SEO campaign.
I haven't experienced that before... But I guess getting out of the sandbox is to have a relevant and quality content on your site? Correct me if I'm wrong. And oh, that's normal for a new site I guess..