Ok, after reading several google sandbox threads i wanted to try to reach a consensus among the people. Many of you think that getting too many links at one time will automatically trigger a penalty and cause google to send your site into the infamous 'sandbox'. Others say that different factors put you in the sandbox such as a site being too new etc. And some even say the sandbox doesn't exist. What do you all think and why?
toddieg let me put this to you .. IF they was a filter for the number of BL's to your domain, don't you think that your competitors would be all linking to you in the hope of knocking you out from the search results? I'm no SEO expert, but my guess would be that they don't filter on backlinks. Now a sudden increase in the number of pages indexed by Google, thats a different story!
well I am definitely not an seo expert. However with the co-op I have added approximately 10,000 to my site within a 1 month period and I have only seen my rankings improve. Not sure if it has anything to do with it but my domain is about 3-4 years old. With the newest update I have seen the best improvements in serps since the site went live. Cheers. So I am not sure how it would effect a new site but so far I havent seen any proof of the sandbox. I will buy a new domain and throw some decent co-op weight at it and see what happens. I will let you know. I think that should be a decent test. Give it enough time for google to update and heh it will be interesting to see the serp results. Thanks, Juls
Let me give my honest opinion. If your site "stands out" from the rest of the sites in your sector as being particularly optimized - getting lots of links very, very fast, all with the same anchor text, etc. it shouldn't be that hard for an algorithm to catch the site and tag it as "special". My understanding of Google's process from here is to do either a more sophisticated automatic evaluation (through a more time-intensive algo) or a human review (I know it sounds crazy, but there's good evidence - see my blog). If your site looks cool and natural, out you go to rank with the rest. But, if your site looks sketchy, it's into the box you go.
Yea - you never know..... It could just trigger a flag and get scheduled for a human review.... Not neccessarily get boxed, but manually reviewed..... I always have the feeling that age plays a big role in things like this...... I think a domain that is old and established, avoids most filters and possible scruitiny.... If I were an engine, if an old estalished site gained massive links all at one, I would not neccessarily be worried about it as much as a newer site..
I've noticed a trend in 2 sites which i manage. Those two were actively linked with the same anchor text and the links were growing at a very rapid rate from various different sites. Guess what, they went from page 1 to page 10 on Google but are still on page 1 in MSN and yahoo. There are lots of speculation around forums about this and I am going to have to agree with them through my own experience.