energylevel - 9:24 am on Nov 24, 2005 (gmt 0)

<<< One thing you perhaps haven't considered is whether Google used whois data to apply the filter to all your sites? Could they have attributed them all back to you / your company and applied the sandbox that way? >>>

Nope the sites I'm talking about are not ours but clients and that was already a consideration, we only ever register domains in the clients name (it would be wrong to anything else anyway). And the hosting has varied, on different IP ranges and with different hosting companies, we use three different companies for hosting and some were hosted elsewhere with the clients own hosting, so I don't see how Google could find a connection.

The overriding common factor is that all sites were in extremely commercial areas, however they were legitimate sites for legitimate businesses, not scrapers, affiliate sites or any junk of that nature.

The idea that non optimised sites will avoid the sandbox is a joke! If you don't optimise a new site you'll get little in way of rank in most cases, if you do optimise you'll get sandboxed, that's the noise I'm hearing coming from some people here, that would suggest this is a catch 22 for many sites and the only solution is waiting for however months Google deems is necessary before the site will rank properly.