I have a site that was started in January. One of my programmers hastily copied the robots.txt info from another site and made an error in it, effectively banning all search engines. I give him hell for it now, some 'programmer' I say LOL It was an honest mistake. Anyway, put up a little content then, but was pulled away by more pressing products. Came back a few weeks ago and saw the mistake, fixed it, etc. Question being: will the three months that Google was dissallowed from the site count for me when it comes to the sandbox aging, or will it begin from when I fixed the robots.txt? TIA.
can't say for granted but my own experience. I did something similar on one of my sites past november and it was banned since then with not hope to see it re-indexed, despite the fixed error and resubmission to all search engines :'(
I don't think anyone really knows other than google. I have heard that it is the links that are sandboxed, so I think you are ahead of the game.