An idea, can you avoid the 9 month sandbox period by purchasing another domain that is already in your vertical and having that 301'ed back to your new domain name? Has anyone done this before? Please share your experience.
I did it in the reverse with one site from the sandboxed site to the newly-purchased site and it worked. I bought an expired domain, took 8 weeks before I could take it over because of all of the buy-back rules, blah blah blah. This was a PR3 site that was top-3 ranking on several keywords that I wanted. The company went out of business so I grabbed their name. Then I copied my sandboxed site over to the new domain, changed the title tags, header tags, all of the meta stuff and the body text on the page ... just enough to make it different. Took about 2 months to settle down, but the SERP #3 dropped off, then came back to #20, then #15, then #12 ... now it's #9 and I am about to start light linkbuilding to it. That's the best I've been able to get out of the sandbox. I am in SUPER competitive keyword competition with hundreds of players trying to get the same keywords, so it's tough and I assume the sandbox will last quite a while.
stonepilot - thanks comment. i see how the reverse makes sense - buy "loved sandboxed domain" redirect to G-loved domain. but i want to keep the domain i like and get that out of the sandbox. do you have another other ideas? thank you in advance.
stonepilot, thanks for all your insight on the dp forum. i still have a questio remaining... i just bought an expired domain which is currently sandboxed - we'll call it sandboxed.com. i went to get sandboxed.com out of the sandbox and to start ranking sooner than the typically supposed 6-9 months. can/should i buy a stronger domain - call it pr3.com - and then have that redirected to sandboxed.com. will that get me out of the sandbox? any insight is greatly appreciated. thanks, chinesechess