Excellent advice and thanks for the post. I also tell people to not let their sites go live until they are fully ready to be indexed. IE: have your SILO structure set up properly before letting the spiders see your site. This is easy to do by using the a no follow tag in your meta description on your home page or any page you do not want to be seen. In WordPress it is very simple to do by going into your privacy settings and just clicking the tab that says do not show site to search engines. Once everything is set up correctly is when you should let it rip for real.

Ray

Great question. In our experience although massive backlinks are one of the prime reasons for getting sand boxed, there are other possibilities that you might want to look into. Keyword density and keyword stuffing could cause sand boxing. If you are stuffing too many keywords onto your pages that may cause a red flag.

Another thing to watch for is duplicate content. Many sites these days use PLR material or cookie cutter template sites with content pre-written. If there are already sites indexed in Google showing the same content, that could be another reason you are getting sand kicked in your face. If you buy a cookie cutter site you need to get some original content on the site before letting it go live. When Google first sees and spiders your site you want it to be picking up some original stuff, not material that it may have already seen a few hundred times.

Good Luck,

Ray