I sure hope your right schlottke. I've managed to get decent anchor positions with the help of the ad network and other links and it sure would be nice to end up in the same spot in the serps.
So the general consensus is that it doesn't apply to new pages of 'established' or alreadu indexed and decently ranking sites? I've also seen people using the word sandbox describing the situation of new links to an existing page not 'counting' yet. ThinkBling is right in that it is confusing. At the contrary to the so-called sandbox, I see new pages (on existing site) bump up to really nice positions within 24hr of going live. Then drop later, only to return indeed after the 'sandbox' period. So, what's this initial 'bump' called then?
I doubt if anyone will ever figure it out? I put a new page up a little over a month ago with no extrernal links to it and only 3 or 4 internal links. It was indexed in 24 hours and came up #1 for a term with 108,000 competing pages and #3 for a term with 880,000 competing. Still at #1 in one but droped to #9 after about a week in the more competitive term. Actually there is more involved in figuring this out then my brain can compute.
schlotkke - You must tell us your secret - I've been #1 allinanchor, allintext, allintitle, allinurl since June - I've been #1 @ Yahoo & MSN and top 3 at Teoma, Hotbot, AltaVista, you name it, but still can't break Google's top 25... And it's not a very competitive term.
Have you also tried getting non-main keyword backlinks? It would be easy to flag sites that have 99% of their backlinks for the same keyword.
'Matt Cutts (of Google) on the other hands basically thought there was nothing in it and that there is no sandboxing “I don’t know where this sandboxing theory started from..†' Source: SES London 2004 Review by Alan Webb
The main part of that post is... Any way you look at it though, brand new search engines do not have enough cached data to have a sandbox or site or link quarantine.
ThinkBling & TopS30 - I have a directory of sites that have OBLs to some of the top 10 and many of the top 50 sites for my kw phrases. Regarding anchor text - I have about 60% for my primary kw phrase, another 25% just have my URL and the rest are widely varied. I have around 500 unique sites with IBLs... The name of the sandbox may be totally inappropriate, but at this point, no one is going to start calling it something else. The key is that new(er) sites are under a type of penalty, it's just a question of what that penalty is and how/why some sites avoid it. I've been thinking that maybe deeper links is part of the answer, but haven't been able to test yet - it's very hard to get people to link to internal pages...
The two you're referring to are, I believe: TLD - Temporary Link Devaluation, whereby new links don't gain their full value until a certain amount of time has passed - arguments exist about whether this affects all sites or just new(er) sites. AND Sandbox - The purposeful devaluation of new(er) sites in the SERPs through use of a time filter, etc. Both are speculative theories, but I hope people aren't calling TLD the sandbox, there have already been problems with people calling it BLOOP or BLOOD which are both technically incorrect terms. A lot of people say TLD is what causes people to think there's a sandbox, but I've never seen good evidence of this (nor have I seen good evidence the other way).
Should the TDL exist, it would certainly account for what my sites are currently experiencing. Same signs: high rankings for allinanchor: allintitle: and allintext:, but the sites cannot even list for a wide range of keywords. One site in Particluar, a new site, has been "held back" since February. Here is why I wanted to post: I read in this thread that the age of the site the link is coming from may be a factor. I do not believe this is true from what I have seen. To me it appears to be the age of the link itself. - PT