Sandboxed for 11 months - advice v. appreciated

If you can offer some genuinely useful advice, I'll really, really thank you (really - you'll know it)....

I've a travel guide website that's been sandboxed by Google for 11 months now. Rankings were great for first two weeks, since then the site is ranked way below where it should should be.

Google's webmaster tools shows over 1200 one way incoming links. The site does next to no reciprocal linking. No links have been purchased - all the inbounds are from directories, do-follow blogs, do-follow forums, other travel websites etc. Homepage PR is 4, the sites blog is PR 5. There's 250 pages indexed by Google.

I'm beginning to wonder if the site will ever get out of the Sandbox. I might still be in the sandbox for any of the following reasons - if anyone has any experience of / advice with regards to being sandboxed or somehow penalized for these reasons, and what I can do about it, I'd really appreciate it:

1. The site targets quite a few mis-spellings. about 10% of the pages are SEO'd for mis-spellings (think "Londen hotels").

2. All pages have adsense on them.

3. The majority of pages have affiliate links on them. Today I removed a load and added no-follow tags to those that remain as I thought this could be a reason.

4. About 80% of inbound links are on sites where I've personally added them (forums, blogs, edit this page sites etc.) - not exactly natural inbound links.

5. For some reason, images only appear in Google's search results when the adult filter is turned off - ???

I can't post the sites url, but would really appreciate any tips....

 

That's too long for sandbox alone. Is your on page optimization good? Keywords not overstuffed, Header tags in place, metas,descriptions, internal link structure. No hidden links on your pages are there?

Have any of your links lost a lot of PR? Any bad neighborhoods you link to?

PM me your URL and I'll look a little closer. Not an expert, but doing OK at #8 for my niche keywords in Google (8 month old sites). It does bounce between #7-#15, and still don't have it down what causes it, but at least my sites are no longer sandboxed. It took about 4 months of little to no movement (about 500 in SERP), then it steadily rose to my current positions.

Be sure you get a steady source of links with follow. I don't think link exchanges hurt either especially if related, they just don't have the full link juice.

 

that is very weird, but maybe social bookmarking could be helpfull

 

Not really mis-spelling to be honest. Cause in Dutch it's Londen Hotels, instead of London Hotels. Just a side-note!

I hope you get out soon and back in the top 10 again!