I personally do not think Sandbox really exists. If a site is competiting for a very competitive or even medium competitive keyword, it makes sense that results from the new site yet have to establish the usefulness over the old ones. You can see the same in our daily lifes. We value people more who we know for long time. When we know somebody new, we take our time before really trust them all the way.

New sites although can get away getting higher ranking for low-competition keywords. I had seen that for several of my sites.

So what can you do to improve your rankings for your new site? I would suggest these:

1. Add fresh content often. This ensures that search engine bots visit your site frequently.
2. Submit your pages to sites that are very frequently visited by SE bots. Social networking sites fall in this category. Care should be taken to pick sites which fall in your site category.
3. Along with targeting higher competitive keywords, target long-tail keywords. This will get you some traffic to keep the hopes up. For bigger sites traffic from long tail keywords fills the major part of the daily traffic source.
4. Continually build backlinks. The key to building backlinks are getting links from RELATED sites and building links for different pages of the sites, not just the home page.

PLR meand Private Label Rights. There are PLR article packs for sale that allow you use the articles without violating the copyright.

Problem is many sellers steal articles from others to make a PLR pack. So its kind of good idea buying them from sellers that are reputed.

As per SEO, this could pose some problem as the site is launched. Search engines crawl sites with less content and less visitors with greater intervals. And that means people may see the under construction message for a while even after you launch your site.

A good practice probably would be using a robots.txt page telling search engines not to index that page.

First lets take a look at the factors that could effect the time length for SEO results:

1. Is your site optimized well?

You gotta tell search engine bots what your web pages are about. A well optimized site would rank faster then a site that bots are getting problem crawling.

2. How competitive is your keyword

More the competition, more time you would need. For highly competitive keywords these would greatly help:

• More backlink
• More fresh content
• Well optimized pages

3. How new is your site

New sites without much links will have hard time compete with established sites. Thats kind of common sense I guess.

These are not all the factors, but would get you an idea.

Timeline:

Considering all the factors mentioned above, and more possibly, in general it might take somewhere from a few weeks to more then a year. Established sites tend to rank faster then the new ones.

An SEO Timeline Case Study:

I started webcosmo.com beginning of 2007. I was able to make a top 3 rank in Google for a keyword with 65 Million. Then there were other keywords ranked well within the same time frame.

It may help if I give you an idea of the things I have done:

• Constant link building. I did it almost everyday for a year.
• I built some free tools and gave it free. That gave me free backlinks
• I bought Yahoo directory listing. I don’t recommend it though.
• Made a blog with articles in the same niche.

http://www.vbforums.com
http://www.vbcity.com/forums
http://www.programmingtalk.com
http://www.codecomments.com
http://www.codeguru.com/forum
http://www.daniweb.com/forums
http://forums.devshed.com
http://www.gidforums.com
http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/default.aspx?siteid=1
http://www.developerfusion.co.uk/forums
http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums
http://www.codeproject.com/script/Forums/view.aspx

With lot of people misusing the social networking websites, most of the popular ones use NOFOLLOW tags on links these days.

I am sure you have heard of the story slow turtle beats the fast rabbit by hard working. This happen to be very true on website marketing as well. Most of us won’t be able to make Digg front page or so to get boost of traffic. I rather find the old fashioned ways, including article marketing, more useful.

Many people tend to get links from high PR websites like directories etc. Used to be the case when getting links from high PR site paid off really well. Not any more.

With current search algorithm getting links from related sites is the most important. No matter what PR the linking site has, if its related to your website you should consider getting a link from it. And that makes the game of link building difficult.

With all the methods mentioned below, many websites may use the NOFOLLOW attribute with links. If you are upto link juice you have to find out which sites are using it, which are not.

Press Release
Submitting press release online helps building links, also can get your website in the news. If your story is interesting enough there are chances of getting published on news media. Write and submit press releases 1 or 2 times a month. Some submissions are free, some paid. I would suggest starting with the free ones.

Article Writing
Write articles and submit to article directories. Most article directories will allow you add 3 links. Put links for the keywords you like to rank your website. This can greatly improve your traffic, and you get backlinks.

Link Directories
Easiest way to get one way backlinks to your site. There are thousand of free directories to submit your site.

Paid Links
You can always buy links from other sites. Don’t start link building with this one though.

Link Bait
Link bait could be writing an interesting article, or developing a useful tool offering it free so other webmasters link to your site. If you have something interesting this could get you thousands of links in no-time.

Social Networking Sites
Social Networking sites (e.g. MySpace.com, Facebook.com) most of the time allows links on the profile page.

Wiki Sites
Many major sites today have added wiki pages with user-edited content. Getting a link from sites like Wikipedia.org would be really great thing to your site.

Forums
There’s a forum for every niche out there. Most forums offer signature links. Use them to get backlinks.

Blogs
Used to be a popular method. Lot of people still use that.

Classified Ads
You can post ads on classified ads sites like webcosmo.com etc. Most of those sites offer free postings.

Using Google Trend tool you can see how well a keyword is doing as per search volume. If you are starting a website its probably a good idea take a peak on how the market trend is; if its going up or its going down.

http://www.google.com/trends

Does it help?
From what I have seen, it really doesn’t help much. That person I mentioned above gets less then 10 hits from those domain redirects; whereas he have to spend several hundred dollars maintaining those domains. Unless they are premium domains or highly searched, buying tons of domains does not really help in marketing.

Best practice
If you happen to have decided to have many domains whats the best practice? Best would not be redirecting to your parent site. Best approach is having separate websites for each of them. Make sure they have different contents with links to your parent site. As you link to the parent site put your target keywords as link anchor text. If you do that, your domains will get indexed on search engines for different keywords. Also gets your parent site backlinks.