Penalty Site, or just a fall in PR?

[trimmer80]

Hi,

I have a site that I have had for the last 2 years. At the start of the month I got a link from a pr 7 page and hundreds of pr 6, 5 and 4s. (all from the same site).

in my experience you see the effect of a significant pr boost within the first week.

The site has not seen any change to rankings / traffic.

I was wondering if anyone has experienced any sort of sandboxing on existing sites, or is it just new sites that get there links sandboxed.

[cabowabo]

Google is slowing things down with the domains that we track. We have dozens that have been online for over 5 years and any changes to the links does not go into effect for at least 2 updates, sometimes three. The pages will be listed, but the boost for the link will not be realized for some time. It is just an issue with trying to deal with the spam and affiliate issues. Often your sites gets caught in the crossfire. Welcome to the club, we are all getting stung.

Cheers,

CaboWabo

[MHes]

"is it just new sites that get there links sandboxed. "

I think all new links take time to have an effect..... or maybe if they are from off theme sites they will never have an effect?

[wowy]

Let you links age and you'll be fine.

[nuevojefe]

In my experience, new links have an effect rather suddenly if the domain to which they're pointing is considered an authority in some area, especially DMOZ listed ones.

I've seen some nice jumps 2 weeks into link campaigns. These are taken from a small sample of PR7 sites that just began to target new phrases and have done very well suddenly. The links were also not from high pagerank pages.

[webnewton]

You're being hasty trimmer. Wait till update, and yeah dont' be too fast in accumlating the links.

[trimmer80]

probably being hasty..
but I map my stats very well.
Whenever a get a pr boost I have been able to see a boost in traffic or a substance rank change within a week, as well as seeing an increase in googlebot visits.
This time no change in any.

I am also paying for the link as an advertisment and need to know in the next week or so if i should book another month (and it wasn't cheap).

and yeah dont' be too fast in accumlating the links

can you please explain this statement. My site has been around for 2 years. I am not sure if speed of accumlating links would effect a site of this age.

[elektra]

I have been wondering about that myself... If backward links are obtained too fast, would that be perceived by Google as spamming?
I was about to get my teeeth in a list of a couple hundred prospect sites and ask them to exchange links with mine. But if I succeed in getting say 10% of these to link back, would that be too many for a 3 week old site?
Can anyone shed some light on this?

[trimmer80]

this has been discussed here a couple of times before. Its seems that no one has done solid research in this area.

From googles perpective I can see the advantage of penalising sites growing too fast. It would hurt the spammers that use throw away domains.
But this would also hurt the serps in that extremely popular sites may not rank.... e.g. TV shows, viral marketing sites etc.

I cannot see the advantage of penalising an established site though.

[webnewton]

I am also paying for the link as an advertisment and need to know in the next week or so if i should book another month (and it wasn't cheap).

I can understand, but thats the name of the game. I would advice you to renew your campaign. The update has taken too long this time. I am sure it's due anytime now and you should be relieved after that.

[sit2510]

>>> The site has not seen any change to rankings / traffic.

I will give a time frame of 90 days to determine whether that link is effective or not in boosting your rank.

[Total Paranoia]

I will give a time frame of 90 days to determine whether that link is effective or not in boosting your rank.

This rumour might have been started by someone who sells links :)

This is what I see happenning:

Check the cache of the page that links to you. If your link is showing on the page, this means that Google knows about the link and is giving you any boost that you might get. Remember we are on a rolling update so things change all the time. IMO if you are not sandboxed, things will not change any further in 90 days - as much as I would love them to.

I have been grudually getting inbound links to a few different unrelated websites daily and notice a small boost (Not for PR of course - only for target keywords) for each link within 2-3 days.

[sit2510]

>>> This rumour might have been started by someone who sells links :)

That's simply not true; it started from someone who notice that Google has delayed in crediting new links and I happened to be one of them.

>>> I have been grudually getting inbound links to a few different unrelated websites daily and notice a small boost...for each link within 2-3 days.

A small boost within 2-3 days may have its cause from links that you got 45-90 days ago, but you think that the boost is from those few days ago. As you said by yourself, you gradually got inbound links "daily".

Look, if you wanted to see whether the "sandbox" effect is real or myth; try pointing new inbound links (PR4 or PR5) with "anchor text" of less competitive terms to some internal pages of your site. If you are fortunate, you will see that your ranks get a temporaty boost within a few days or a week after you put the links. This temporary ranking boost can range from a few days to a few weeks, before it falls back to the original position. Not until 45-90 days after the sandbox, you will see the final real boost in your ranking.

No matter what you want to call it - My personal experience supports the existence of "sandbox" that could be dated back to December 2003 by which I didn't know its real meaning until April 2004, but your own experience may be different from mine :)

[tenerifejim]

>>> This rumour might have been started by someone who sells links :)
That's simply not true; it started from someone who notice that Google has delayed in crediting new links and I happened to be one of them.

I think the smiley tells us it was a joke.

Here's my observations: new pages on my nine month old site are listed within 4-5 days in the serps.

Inbound links, PR changes and SERP changes take much longer to take effect.

[trimmer80]

My experience is the same as Total Paranoia's. Generally the better the link, the faster the effect from the link and it is has always been within a week.
I know that if these links are counted they will have an impact on traffic. Thus I am thinking I have been sandboxed.

sit2510,
Have you had inbound links affected by sandboxing on a site that is mature. e.g. more than 6 months old.
I have only heard of sandboxing in relation to new domains and this is why I was not expecting to be hit.

[Total Paranoia]

A small boost within 2-3 days may have its cause from links that you got 45-90 days ago, but you think that the boost is from those few days ago. As you said by yourself, you gradually got inbound links "daily".

Sit2510.

On one of those websites, I started just 3-4 weeks ago.

I am not saying you are wrong by saying a 90 day wait for a boost, just that we are obviously having different experiences. What is the size, age and PR of the websites you are currently working with?

[pmac]

>inbound links affected by sandboxing on a site that is mature.<

New links to existing pages are feeling the lag as well.

[trimmer80]

New links to existing pages are feeling the lag as well.

I was hoping that this was not the cause.. it looks like it is though.

As it only seems to be hitting some people, I guess my next question is does anyone have any theories on how to avoid / overcome this, and why only some are affected?

[trimmer80]

out of interest. Does anyone know if the word

'advertise' or a derivative of this has been used on the page of a link that is being sandboxed.

The site i advertise on has this as a outbound like and I am curious if this is a trigger.

[mfishy]

If your link is showing on the page, this means that Google knows about the link and is giving you any boost that you might get.

This is simply false.

[sit2510]

>>> Have you had inbound links affected by sandboxing on a site that is mature. e.g. more than 6 months old.

>>> What is the size, age and PR of the websites you are currently working with?

trimmer80 & Total Paranoia,

Ok, I merge your questions into one answer.

There are 3 types of websites that contain the destination pages that received links pointing into. I worked on all these sites from ground up so I have both conscious and subconscious ideas of their performance - what make some work while what make some fail.

Type 1 (only 1 site) -

Size around 15k - all done by manual html pages
Age since 1998 and PR of hub pages PR5-6 and the actual targeted page (subpages) is PR4 & PR3.

Type 2 - (3 out of 5 sites - style pyramidal or semi-pyramidal structure),

Size over 100 pages but less than 1,000.
Age since 2000, 2002, & 2003.
Home: PR5 - PR6

Type 3 - (5 - style flat fully-messhed)

Size more than 30 less than 150 pages
Age since 2002, 2003 and 2004
Home: PR5

The links are from other sets with the age between 2002 and 2003 ranging mostly from PR4 and PR3 pages.

The effect of sandbox bears similar characteristics but not exactly the same such as length of delay and the effectiveness of ranking boost.

I hope this help to answer your questions.

[nuevojefe]

New links to existing pages are feeling the lag as well.

Not always.

[tenerifejim]

New links to existing pages are feeling the lag as well.

Not always.

I believe that Google are playing with a new 'randomise-answers-for-webmasters-tool' ;)