One of our old mature websites has been ranking very well for years and about 5 days ago, it was thrown in the sandbox. You can also tell this by seeing that the index page is ranking on fourth page http://www.google.co.uk/#hl=en&q=si...free-will.co.uk/&gs_rfai=&fp=43750d86ae6e95f3 http://www.free-will.co.uk/ I have checked everything I can possibly think of. Bad links, sitemap errors, bad neighbourhood, spyware, dns errors, code errors etc... The only problem i see is the high keyword density in the h2 tags, i would never do them like that these days, but the site was ranking well, so its been left. I keep adding links into the site over the last 24 hours, and it comes out of the sandbox for 10 minutes, then bounces back in again. I am getting nofollow attribute added to the affiliate links, there is nothing else i can see wrong. Any ideas? Normally i get sites out of the sandbox within hours... maybe it may take longer? I am adding links and waiting, however its costing alot of money being in the sandbox, so I want to make sure i havent overlooked something.
I crosslinked a new site b to a 11 month old site a - site a got pushed back 30 places, I removed the link and site a bounced back. From what I've read, it sounds like your site has a penalty not the sandbox - I thought the sandbox was for new sites?????
I call it the sandbox, the way I have always perceived it, is that a penalty stops the whole site ranking, but on this case its just the index page that was penalised. All the other pages are ranking as usual. It seems to be ok at the moment, but it may change again.
Do you mean you're adding nofollows to your own site's outgoing links? Or your backlinks are getting them added? That might reduce your place, but it wouldn't penalise you. But it could look like a penalty if your keywords are real competitive. Does this happen when you add only backlinks, or two way link exchanges?
It's not your site it's Google! Tons of sites have been dropped. Check WMW forum. There is long thread about Google Caffeine there.