Buying Existing Site

Could Sandbox affect this?

[dupac]

We are looking at buying an existing website that has been around for over 2 years and ranks in the top 100 for a competitive keyword (3,000,000+ results). We want to get a site that ranks well for that keyword and will plan on optimizing it for it as soon as we assume ownership.

However, the site does not look to have gotten any new links in the past 6-9 months. We plan on doing some aggressive linking campaigns and plan to triple the amount of incoming links in the next 2-3 months. Do you think this could cause any problems (assuming we are successful)?

According to what most people are posting, this seems to be fine. As long as you are out of the Sandbox, you are clear and this should work.

However, I did have one theory about the Sandbox. If Google finds a new site and sees it gets a significant number of links in the first few months, it may look strange to them. This may not be "natural" according to what generally happens on the web, so maybe some sort of "time" penalty is applied. On the other hand, if you don't get a significant amount of new links (within the first 3-4 months), then the site would not be have the ability to rank for a competitive keyword. However, the site could rank for a non competitive keyword, since it would not need many incoming links in order for it to rank. Anyway, I don't really have much evidence to this theory (other than my one example below), but wanted to see what other people thought. This could help explain the Sandbox, but it would not necessarily mean it only applied to new sites. It would seem to affect new sites more so and would definitely prevent them from ranking on highly competitive keywords quickly, but it would also mean it could be applied to older sites.

This seems to have happened to a site we have worked with. The site was older than 18 months and had backlinks showing. We made new page on it, and that page showed up (around 120 in the SERPS) for a competitive keyword after about a week. We continued working on getting links for it and it has now disappeared from the SERPS in Google altogether, whereas it has consistently moved up in Yahoo and the new MSN.

[dupac]

Any one with any bright ideas on this one?

[ogletree]

I have done this and it worked fine. You just have to be carefull if you do anything remotly black hat you can always get banned. If you go and buy a bunch of links or add thousands of new page or change the subject of the site you can get banned. We did that once we bought a site that was number one for a term we liked. We completly changed the type of site. Both could use the word but were completly differnt companies. The site is now banned. Remember your competiters are watching. They will do anything to get you banned. Like get your site taken out of DMOZ or turn you into Google. (had that done to me).

[kevinpate]

Assuming (but not knowing) that the sandbox can in fact nail an older domain if there's a sudden rush of new links detected, and
Assuming from the various threads here that the sandbox effect when in place runs 6 months to a year, maybe longer, then
making a deliberate decision to move at a significantly slower pace for the link acquisition than you anticipate seems to be a prudent course of action. Better to delay a trip up the serps by a month or 3 than to be stuck in notsoquicksand for 8-14 months.

[walkman]

"We did that once we bought a site that was number one for a term we liked. We completly changed the type of site. Both could use the word but were completly differnt companies. The site is now banned. "

how is that bad as far as Google is concerned? Am I missing something? You can change the content, no?