Paid links and Google Sandbox

I'll admit I was a link whore and bought some high and very high pr text links. I was wondering if paid links will keep you in the sandbox longer?
The more bought pr the deeper you dig yourself in?
My site was 1 crawled in December and still no luck with competitive keywords. My homepage is a pr4 but I have 5's and 6's on the inside. I figured my homepage would rank higher and I do a lot of deep linking. Am I not getting pr to my homepage since that is where most of the paid high pr links point to?

I guess my main question is if I move away from bought links and as hard as it is going to be find, go for organic links will this get me out quick?
I wonder if Google flags it somehow and gives an over optimization penalty?
Mr. Cutts post on his blog really makes me wonder if that are cracking down much harder that we realize.

 

Paid links won't keep you in the sandbox longer because Google doesn't know that you paid for them. How would Google know which links are purchased and which are organic?

Now the paid links may have poor anchor text, may be on a page oversaturated with links, etc but it's hard to really say anything without a URL.

Hope that helps!

 

check out www.mattcutts.com/blog I really think Google is surpressing pages passing pr more than everyone thinks. This blog post has really got me re-thinking how to get links.

 

well thats what it supposed to do

 

you should not pay for links while you are in sandbox, it's a waste of money since you dont appear in serps

 

is it a bad idea to pay for links that put you on thousands of pages. has anyone found that google seems to notice this?

 

This is one of those questions that it's hard to answer.
Some call it link buying but years ago I remember it was just advertising.

Buying link spots from sites that have no connection with your content might me a waste.
I started buying link & banner spots on related sites. I could care less about the PR but as long as I get what I paid for on a site in the same industry.

 

Cutts is a very well known SEO, so I really am not surprised.

 

Extremely bad idea. If they are not directories where you get to choose what categories you are in.... And you are submitted to random sites that have nothing to do with yours, Google will dock you thinking you linked farmed etc..