Bunk. If there is a sandbox, I successfully avoid it with nearly every site I build. I must have a midas touch.
Natural Backlinks= No problem. irecxtories have litle to no effect Link Buying then you are in a spot. If your sites remove the links after 2 months, you will be pushed to the bottom and probably penalised.
It depends on many factors, like: The anchor text, have you repeated it too much? The linking site, is it a quality site or a page with 100s of links? are you getting multiple links from the same domain/ip? Are you deep linking>?