Coming Soon pages and the Sandbox

Which is the path of least resistance?

[Rollo]

I'm interested in hearing anyone's opinions/experiences with "Coming Soon" pages and the Google sandbox for new domains. Since it seems to take about a year to get out of the Sandbox in a lot of areas (mine surely), should webmasters "start the clock" with a coming soon page or perhaps a lame links page before a site is really ready to start adding real content everyday or should we wait?

Timing appears to be everything.

Your thoughts...

[TypicalSurfer]

Scrap the coming soon thing and put non-commercial content on the site, if you are trying to sell widgets, put up "about widgets", "widgets glossary", etc, do not go commercial out of the box, those KWS are locked, what folks are calling "sand box" is really just commercial filters, if you see adwords inventory, you have a scarlet letter for a time frame that is dependent on how much $ is in that inventory but you should rank out of the box for educational stuff with a few inbound links.

Its frustrating to get traffic on "perpindicular widgets and their effect on wodgets" while the rest of your site goes begging but thats the way it is.

[Rollo]

I'm not sure what determines the length of stay in the Sandbox but I do think that assigning value via adwords statistics is the primary element. I'm wondering if getting a minimal page up that then shows little activity for a long time might cuase greater problems down the road.

[JudgeJeffries]

I seeded a load of pages with lorem and it seemed to work.

[Nextec]

I purchased my domain 5 years ago and basically did the "coming soon" thing with a brief company overview. I finally launched a 60 page site about 3 months ago, acquired good links and I am in the sandbox the same as most other new sites.