Rick_M - 4:20 am on Sep 29, 2004 (gmt 0)

My theory:

before the sandbox, it was easy to slap a focused anchor text link to a new page on a high PR page and you'd suddenly rank top 10 for the focused anchor text - the higher the PR of the link, the better your ranking, even for somewhat competitive terms. "Minty freshness" was too much of a good thing.

Not only does the sandbox combat people from spamming the SERPs, but it is an effective way to combat buying links. How would you feel paying a lot of money per month for a high page rank link, only to see that there were no results month after month - and you'd never know when, if at all, it would pay off.

Interesting comment above about a sitewide link pushing a site into the sandbox. I have a similar experience with a domain I set up for fun. I had linked to the site from all of my main sites pages with the anchor text: "Keyword1 Keyword2 Keyword3". The site ranked #1 for all three keywords, but around 4th for "keyword1 keyword2". No one would search for the 3 keywords together, so I changed the anchor text site wide to "keyword1 keyword2" - within 1 week, the site won't rank in the top 40 (this was around 6-8 months ago now). I change the anchor text back to 'keyword1 keyword2 keyword3' and the site still doesn't rank well for any of the keywords - and these are not competitive keyword combinations.

One other interesting experience - I had a few odd pages that were getting a lot of search traffic for a specific phrase. I went ahead and set up a page specifically for that phrase that then linked to the other pages that had been getting the traffic. I then linked to the new page from my site's home page. This was about 1 year ago, and now, not a single page on that site ranks for the keywords I was targetting. These were also not very competitive keywords. It seemed that if I overdid a page for a specific set of keywords, nothing on the site would rank for those keywords. Don't know if anyone else has seen anything like this.