Maximum links per day to avoid the sandbox

newsguy · 11-18-2004, 05:56 AM

We all know about the Google sandbox, where your links lie for months until Google finally decides to apply them to your ranking, but from what I understand that only happens if you get a large quantity of links at a time.

Is there a known "safety limit" on how many links to add per day to avoid getting thrown into the sandbox?

jg_v7n · 11-18-2004, 08:10 AM

I was under the impression that the sandbox applied to all links...

Shawn · 11-18-2004, 10:29 AM

I believe there to be a sandbox lifter though as well. Like for instance, say Google.com linked to a brand new site. I think that would pull a site from the sandbox. It also seems that if you get links from tons of different places it helps too.

One thing I've noticed is that these "SEO experts" who claim they have more backlinks and pr than the sites above them yet their site is sandboxed is that the backlinks they have are usually from one or two site-wide footer-type link on a high pr site with alot of pages.

Papadoc · 11-18-2004, 11:50 AM

I agree. Established sites don't seem to have the same sandbox penalty put on them as new sites.

This brings up the idea of a pre-launch, which has seems to work well for me. I've got a regular launch schedule that's about two years out with launching a new site about every 6 months. I put up several article pages with lots of text and give them links on a rather remote page that gets very little traffic on established sites so they are indexed by search engines.

By launch, they are "established" and have at least a little bit of PR and then so far at least, when I do go get incoming links, they don't seem to get sandboxed.

Brian911 · 11-18-2004, 12:13 PM

I found that the advice given on many major forums to bypass the sandbox, namely to get MORE backlinks, does not work out. In fact it seems to delay the process even more, at least that was what more links did for me.

One of my other sites, which received very few backlinks at first, was out of the sandbox by 4 weeks! I will continue to do this in the future... start with low page count and backlinks and work from there once the site is out of the sandbox.

ccarte2 · 11-18-2004, 12:24 PM

Is it a bad idea to put a sight up that begins with a large number of pages?

thebassman · 11-18-2004, 05:31 PM

One of the things I have seen that seem to help people get out of the "sandbox" is naturalizing your links... don't have 4000 backlinks with all the same anchor text... vary it up a bit.

ferret77 · 11-18-2004, 07:41 PM

I have sites with almost 100% the same anchor text that I got to rank in the top 100 for some pretty serious terms in less the a few months

but top 100 is totally useless so i am still screwed

ferret77 · 11-18-2004, 07:42 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Brian911

One of my other sites, which received very few backlinks at first, was out of the sandbox by 4 weeks! I will continue to do this in the future... start with low page count and backlinks and work from there once the site is out of the sandbox.

what do you consider out of the sandbox?

top 10?

thebassman · 11-18-2004, 08:34 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ferret77

I have sites with almost 100% the same anchor text that I got to rank in the top 100 for some pretty serious terms in less the a few months

but top 100 is totally useless so i am still screwed

Yeah, that's what happened with me... I was initially targetting "photography forum" and I stayed in the 80-120 range for months.... once I started adding backlinks like "digital photography forum", "photography forums", "photography resources" etc, is when I pulled up, and I'm now in the top 15 for all of my targetted terms... a couple in the top 10 (and still slowly rising).

randfish · 11-20-2004, 02:09 AM

Hate to rain on the parade, but I have to disagree with both Shawn:

Quote:

One thing I've noticed is that these "SEO experts" who claim they have more backlinks and pr than the sites above them yet their site is sandboxed is that the backlinks they have are usually from one or two site-wide footer-type link on a high pr site with alot of pages.

and Brian

Quote:

start with low page count and backlinks and work from there once the site is out of the sandbox.

My site started in June of 2003 - was never ranked well because it had no SEO efforts - it built a few good natural links from other businesses and financial listing services, a couple news articles, etc.

But, when SEO efforts began in April of this year, the sandbox immediatlely kicked in - the site doesn't use sitewides, started with several good links, was SEOd very naturally - I went through the top listings for all the keyword phrases at Google and requested links from all the sites - got quite a few after several months, and now outlink many of the top competition.

My speculation about sandbox is that it's even more devious and evil than we think - whenever I hear rumors about sandbox from the restricted access forums at webmasterworld, I always here - uninstall your Google Toolbar...

This leads me to have chills... Of course, I'm probably just paranoid and my site has snagged a normal algo filter like everyone else.

ferret77 · 11-20-2004, 07:17 AM

I don't know, what the exact casue is but I it seems that adding a ton more links still makes sites go up

At first I thought that maybe it was due to recip links, but its been a awhile now and nobody has written an article or anything saying that.

which would make sense if they wanted to keep it a secret, but it seems that someone would have slipped by now

I'm sure all of this stuff has been discussed before, but I find the intial buzz about whatever the new thing is , tend to be full of crazy theorys

I intially thought google had just drastically slowed down their cycle

but after workign a bunch more sites , it seems definitely selective

RLRay · 11-20-2004, 07:34 AM

How many people here really think having the Google toolbar installed is going to contribute to a sandbox effect?

Curious...

Randy

**John Scott** · 11-20-2004, 07:53 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by RLRay

How many people here really think having the Google toolbar installed is going to contribute to a sandbox effect?

Curious...

Randy

I really doubt that would be done.

thebassman · 11-20-2004, 04:17 PM

Yeah, I don't think so either...

awall19 · 11-23-2004, 08:00 AM

I think the toolbar connectivity is probably not used to heavily for most webmasters.

OptWizard · 11-23-2004, 10:11 AM

>>>what do you consider out of the sandbox?
top 10?<<<

this line is the funniest so this would mean anything not in the top 10 is so called sandboxed.

maybe if site is not in top 10 they are not optimized well and not enough quality links, could that be it?

I doubt that not being in top 10 is this so called sandbox.

ferret77 · 11-23-2004, 12:29 PM

well if its my site does

RingingPHoneML · 11-23-2004, 01:33 PM

does anyone accept responsibility anymore? whatever happened to "i failed and did something wrong."

it's like all the responses to the msn beta search. they are "it's great. my site ranks high." or "it sucks. i don't rank."

Maybe if you don't rank in MSN, Google or Yahoo!, you are doing something wrong and it's not the SE.

ferret77 · 11-23-2004, 04:58 PM

nope its the sandbox