SEO "Expert" says: stop all link building when in the sandbox

[CMCarlin]

I thought this read was at the very least entertaining but it also goes against what I've heard here and other "backlink forums". I've heard many tried and true link spammers say that when you are sandboxed, pretend like nothing happened and stay on course. This guy here:

How To Get Your Site Out Of Davy Jones Locker

says to hault all link building and then go change all kinds of SEO properties (title, desc etc).

Whaa....???? This guy is a self proclaimed SEO guru. What's going on here?

One of my grumbles of the IM industry is all the conflicting advice. Some say extended domain registrations help, some say not. Anyway, what about this article? What do you think?


EDIT: Can a MOD remove Marks name form the title for me? I don't want to trigger a google alert. Thank ya kindly.

[mandom]

Well, what he actually says is to stop backlinking, change the on-site stuff, then start backlinking again:

"When you have made changes 1-10, continue to add backlinks ‘naturally.’"

Not sure what he means by naturally as there is nothing natural about doing your own backlinking - but whatever.

Changing the onsite stuff shouldn't take more than 1-2 days so really you're only pausing briefly then going back to the routine. So it fits with the other advice about continuing to link as per normal.

[mandom]

Also keep in mind that this is for sandboxing, not the dance. Many, MANY, many people use the two terms interchangeably and incorrectly.

[supamanjon]

some of my sites pop back from sandbox. I've always continued to backlink.

But mamdom can you clarify. if your are dancing does it just pop from top 10 to top 100 or something? Can rank 400 still be considered dancing or is that sandbox?

Do you think adding inner pages and backlinking will do the same as the guy is saying? Anyways regardless of that i've seen sites move back up if i kept profile backlinkg (without adding any new content). Or at least it seemed to.

[stitchlips]

Here is what I have noticed. The dance comes from some type of change, be it to your site or some off site SEO.

I think somewhere in the bowels of the google data center your site is given some sort of value for it's keywords. A numerical value and so is the competition. Your serps are directly affected by this value. I am not talking about page rank either.Think of this value as a big machine just chugging along at a perfect rate.

When you make a change or an off site seo change occurs it screws up this value ( think of throwing a wrench into that perfectly running machine ) and google does not know where to put you until it can assign a newer value and until that is done your site is dancing. This machine, the secret google value is now somewhat broken and must be repaired. You have tampered with what made this secret value and now a new one must be assigned.

Just a thought...

[mandom]

Stitch, I think you're probably fairly accurate in your description. That's pretty much how I view it as well.

As far as Sandbox vs. Dance goes, if your site has been completely deindexed you are in the sandbox. As far as Google is concerned, it does not exist in any positive way and when you do a site: search you get nothing. If your site drops in the SERPs but can still be found you're dancing.

[baby]

CMCarlin I wouldnt take anything seriously about what the so called "SEO expert" says. Lets assume for one second that you have created a website which went viral and gets throusands upon thousands of visitors per day. Your page gets the number spot on G. and stays there for a couple of weeks until it goes poof in lala land all of the sudden. The so called Guru claim to pause your link building but what if you have no control over it? What if the readers want to spread the word and blog about it in their personal websites and therefore increase the amount of inbound links to your site?
Another thing I am up against is the onsite SEO. If it was done correctly then it shouldn't be changed since the "perfect" tweaking was already done. Keep in mind that Google will apply the dance every time there is a sudden increase in backlinks or a change in onsite SEO.
I have noticed that search engines pay attention to the development of your site in social sites during the temporary high ranking. If you make it big you will most likely get a big bonus in ranking on the number one spot.

[jdistad]

I agree with what has been stated here.... You can also look at it this way; If anything you could do with backlinking etc could somehow damage your site everyone would be running massive backlinking campaigns against their competitors.

If company A wants Company B to drop out of the SERPS they Company A just has to drop about 10K backlinks overnight to Company B's site and poof they are gone... so, that scenario to me (and the fact that it doesn't happen) is enough to show a rational reason why this whole process is a lot more fool proof than some "gurus" would have you believe.

[hightower]

About a few months ago I had the sad pleasure watching one of my 3 years old sites getting a page 6-7 penalty from big G.

Its was a very well optimized Joomla site, ranking 1-10 on page 1 for 15-20keywords.

I know there was no "on site" errors, and finally I realized my own stupid mistake - I used SE Nuke to make some profile links, and idiot as I was I used the same anchor text by a mistake - so that was about 150 backlinks with the exact same anchor text.

The site is still indexed and has PR2, and still have top rankings on MSN, Bing and Yahoo - but big G has deranked all results to site 6 or 7 and the results bounch up and down a bit.

I had a break in link building, and started to build some links from some high PR .edu sites and a few blogs, but no results yet..

So now I have decided to rebuild the site in wodpress and see if it helps - else I would need to start over with a new domain.

But it is really sad to see a site the usually generate 5-600$ in Adsense make 11$ a month!

So remember to use different anchor text in your links! ;-)

[stitchlips]

About a few months ago I had the sad pleasure watching one of my 3 years old sites getting a page 6-7 penalty from big G.

Its was a very well optimized Joomla site, ranking 1-10 on page 1 for 15-20keywords.

I know there was no "on site" errors, and finally I realized my own stupid mistake - I used SE Nuke to make some profile links, and idiot as I was I used the same anchor text by a mistake - so that was about 150 backlinks with the exact same anchor text.

The site is still indexed and has PR2, and still have top rankings on MSN, Bing and Yahoo - but big G has deranked all results to site 6 or 7 and the results bounch up and down a bit.

I had a break in link building, and started to build some links from some high PR .edu sites and a few blogs, but no results yet..

So now I have decided to rebuild the site in wodpress and see if it helps - else I would need to start over with a new domain.

But it is really sad to see a site the usually generate 5-600$ in Adsense make 11$ a month!

So remember to use different anchor text in your links! ;-)

Sound like the Google Dance and it could last for months. You upset the system. Is your home page indexed or is it sub pages that are showing in the results.