I know there are a million sandbox threads, but this is not "one of those." I just got done reading some on here and BHW and I wanted to toss some ideas out there and just talk about it.
Generally I see people blaming massive link building straight to the money site as the cause. This has been my experience. I've not really toyed with tiered link building so I can't say whether it is the number of links and velocity, or the PR juice that sandboxes you. Someone recently told me you can dodge it with tiers, so its not the PR juice according to them.
You still lose some juice through the tiers through the dampening effect in the algorithm, so is it possible to hit the money site and avoid the sandbox? If so, then it boils down to anchor text variation.
Now, I have seen some respected SEO's say anchor text variation is a myth, and I've heard that over optimization will sandbox you until you fix it. I've seen people play with this idea (I've personally not done it) to no avail and to success. Of course nobody was isolating variables, so it's all conjecture still.
So as I was reading all this crap, I was less concerned with what causes it. I was concentrating more on how to get out of the sandbox. People were saying add content regularly. People were saying fix anchor text variation. People were saying stop building spammy links. Some said keep building spammy links. Some were saying build quality links.
What I really wanted to toss out there was this idea:
Perhaps the sandbox is caused by an imbalance of "authority juice" and PR juice. If you don't have the authority to support the PR juice you've collected, then you go to the box. This authority then comes from several sources. These would be domain age, links from High PR domains (not necessarily high pr pages since that causes sandboxing), EDU and GOV links, and link age. This explains why letting a blog age first or buying an aged domain helps avoiding the dance and box.
I've got two sites in the sandbox right now that I'm going to try adding content to at least every two days for as long as I can maintain and I'm going to hire out a buttload of Gov and Edu links. I think those will pass some real authority. I'm not going to go back and change anchor text variation. I want to see if the combination of these two things can fix it. You guys got anything to add or comment on?
Generally I see people blaming massive link building straight to the money site as the cause. This has been my experience. I've not really toyed with tiered link building so I can't say whether it is the number of links and velocity, or the PR juice that sandboxes you. Someone recently told me you can dodge it with tiers, so its not the PR juice according to them.
You still lose some juice through the tiers through the dampening effect in the algorithm, so is it possible to hit the money site and avoid the sandbox? If so, then it boils down to anchor text variation.
Now, I have seen some respected SEO's say anchor text variation is a myth, and I've heard that over optimization will sandbox you until you fix it. I've seen people play with this idea (I've personally not done it) to no avail and to success. Of course nobody was isolating variables, so it's all conjecture still.
So as I was reading all this crap, I was less concerned with what causes it. I was concentrating more on how to get out of the sandbox. People were saying add content regularly. People were saying fix anchor text variation. People were saying stop building spammy links. Some said keep building spammy links. Some were saying build quality links.
What I really wanted to toss out there was this idea:
Perhaps the sandbox is caused by an imbalance of "authority juice" and PR juice. If you don't have the authority to support the PR juice you've collected, then you go to the box. This authority then comes from several sources. These would be domain age, links from High PR domains (not necessarily high pr pages since that causes sandboxing), EDU and GOV links, and link age. This explains why letting a blog age first or buying an aged domain helps avoiding the dance and box.
I've got two sites in the sandbox right now that I'm going to try adding content to at least every two days for as long as I can maintain and I'm going to hire out a buttload of Gov and Edu links. I think those will pass some real authority. I'm not going to go back and change anchor text variation. I want to see if the combination of these two things can fix it. You guys got anything to add or comment on?