Is the Google Sandbox back, or was it never away

[courier]

I decided this year to bring along six of my existing 4 and 5 year old sites that did not have many pages, or visitors. The fourth site this morning dropped off the radar. The latest one for the main search term went from 30 to 163 (showing an internal page).

It seems when these sites are getting close to 150 to 200 visitors per day they are getting dropped. They have been built very different, some with link building some not. I am wondering if the Google Sandbox is back, or was it never away? Could it be due to the sites being dormant for so long.

[tedster]

It sounds like a possible trust-checking cycle to me. What kind of "link building" have you done, in the cases where you did do some?

[courier]

The last site that was dropped, I bought 2 links from a reliable source a few months back and a little bit of twitter, it had 300 links when I decided to work with it. Another I added reciprocal links from webmasters that contacted me, but the first and third site that dropped I had never linked, but was going after some big keywords, and getting results.