Over the past couple of months I've been working like crazy building up my backlinks for some of my newer sites. Currently these sites have a PR 0, but using some of the predictor tools (I know, I know...they arent always accurate) I'm looking at a huge jump...in one case zero to possibly a 7. I was just wondering, is there any kind of penalty from gaining rank too quickly?
no there's no penalty like thing. if you working hard on link building you'll be get paid by search engines. I don't know your domain. But jumping from PR 0 to 7 is tough need atleast 10000 link domains for this to happen. If ou have this much then relax till 1st week of Feb and you'll C.
IF you go from a few links one month, to a massive amount teh next, you send a few red flags. This reaks of invalid links, (blog spammers and the like), they might be taken out of consideration for your page rank.
Newer sites are all subject to the sandbox and PR has no effect on that. There is no right answer, it really depends on how you get the links and the relevance of the sites linking to you. PR Predicting tools are completely worthless and I've never found one that is even close to being reliable. Anything after a PR5 is hard to obtain from mere link exchanges. I wouldn't get my hopes up for a PR7 - but anything is possible.
If you get too many links to quickly you might go into the sandbox but if you have really high quality links (to get to a 7 you would likely need them), you will be in the clear.
there is no penalty if you get it naturally. www.milliondollarhomepage.com is an example of a quick jump in pr from PR 0 to PR 7
I'm curious about this too (and I'm too impatient to see what the next tbpr export will bring). I wrote an freeware application (the one in my sig) that adds a link to the software's download page in the author's resource box. It has become quite popular, and the bigdaddy datacenters are reporting 20,000 occurances of the phrase "submitted with Article Distributor" (this is the phrase with the link to the ap's download page). The tool has only been available since December 3rd. This averages out to 350 new links a day, and most are on pages with content that is not related to my site's overall "theme". I guess my real question is should I change the content of my site to more closely match a general category of Article Directory "stuff" thus helping to mitigate the sandbox effect I'm sure I'm bound for? I'm not entirely opposed to the idea of changing the overall theme of the site, and I'm sure I can convince my partners that a slight shift in content would ultimately be good for us. Or, should we just ride it out? We currently get 400-600 unique visits per day, and about 15% of these are to the software download page. About 25% are currently to the support forum for the application. On the other hand, very few of the referrals in my log files are from search engines. (I'm a big fan of working to create traffic without the help of search engines.) I know my traffic will increase even if I get sandboxed. Traffic is the important thing I guess. Opinions?