First, please understand that the issue of ‘trust’ is pure speculation on my part. But, after paying very close attention to Google’s behavior over the last 8 months, trust has surfaced in my mind as a very possible key. In response to your: a) I would say yes if these older sites are trusted. I think that links from trusted sites would increase one’s trust factor (assuming there is such a thing as a trust factor). That alone, would probably have some impact on SERPs and amount of time in the sandbox. I believe that relevant links from more than one trusted site would have significant impact. b) Older sites would be a starting point. I think you want trusted sites. Since trust takes time to build, I think it is more like that an older site would be trusted than a newer site. I think an old site with hidden text or keyword stuffed alt tags for example, would be near worthless. It might even be a PR6 because of its shear number of links, but still worthless because it is not trusted. I’d look for ‘good citizen’ sites, clean of any SEO ‘tricks’ and with backlinks from other clean sites. Those sites probably rank well for main and secondary keywords. No I don’t think old site = good site. I think the main factors that determine rank are relevancy to the search terms, trustworthiness over time, and to some extent, link popularity (PR). In other words, the formula might be: relevancy x trustfactor x PR = site_weight for a specific keyword/phrase. If so, the next question is how heavily is each of the components weighted. Lowering the importance of PR in that formula could have a significant impact on SERPs. Increasing the importance of trust could have the same impact. I think we are already seeing these tweaks.
The suggestions to avoid the sandbox are pretty much what we already know: get high PR links back to the main pages of your site. It will help avoid sandboxing and if the site gets boxed anyway, the links will help get it back up and running faster.
What I am suggesting is that high PR may not be the real qualifier. A page can reach PR7 with merely enough links. What if some number of those links are to sites that have been penalized either now or in the past? That would not necessarily effect PR at all. But if there is a trust factor, and if that factor were lower than average for this PR7 site, a link from it would do you little or no good. Worse, I contend it could actually hurt by lowering your own site’s trust level.
Well written article Brian. Started some good discussion. Your "high PR: link is definitely a valid theory that deserves further investigation. Here are my 2 cents (note: I am not an expert and 2 cents Canadian is worth less in US and Britain) Google has noticed the tendency of webmasters for creating new sites in order to rank well. This happens every minute of the day. Not wanting to encourage this behaviour, it would make sense to remove any form of instant gratification. Think of it, if you new that you could create a site, add 500 links to it and have it go top 5 in a couple of weeks, you would do it more often. Google prides itself on adding new content quickly. Most people don't notice if a new site is not listed high, unless it is newsworthy, and here is a business reason for Brian's logic. For example, if a million people did a search looking for the "site" about "Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction" and didn't find it, they might curse Google and look elsewhere (not a real example). Google would want to prevent that so they might want to give exclusion to sites with links from high PR sites like USA Today and the New York Times. I noticed a couple people giving examples of how Brian's theory didn't apply in their situation. Please remember that it also makes sense for Google to assume spamming if the link text coming in is too similar. Could be the reason for the exception.
I'm coming in late to the thread but around April I had about four new domains. One domain we completed a 30 page site the others were one page placeholders. All using the style of coding and SEO practices the 30 page site actually took over a month longer to get PR than the one page sites. They were all linked from the same PR 7 site. They all have PR 5 and 6 now but it took the first couple domains 3 months to show up. I've done many tests and if we use our PR7 site we can get new pages on the same domain a PR within about 2weeks vs. the new domain taking about 3-4 months
My guess is 3-4 months based on experience. How many threads does it take to get links below your messages in digital point forum?