In June this year I started a new site with a domain I already had registered for about a year. By late August I had the site ranking #1 for some big terms about 27k exacts a month as well as some other commercial terms in the 1-3k exact match/month range. Backlinking up until now was done only very lightly and there was good variety of anchor texts and naked Url's. Late August a competitor hammered my site with about 25k blog spam links all with my big money term. A few weeks later the site started to fall away, Panda refresh hit and the site dropped some more and then penguin saw the site fall to around page 50. I submitted a disavow report and the site dropped even further to page 80ish. As of last night the site is back to page 44 for it's biggest term.
What im started to think though is the site has been put in the sandbox rather than any penguin/panda penalty from the links. I know the site has no manual action against it becuase I sent in a reconsideration request and they said no manual action was taken against the site.
What do you think? Is the site just serving a time out in the sandbox because of the big influx of links? It's been about 3 months now since the site started to drop.
What im started to think though is the site has been put in the sandbox rather than any penguin/panda penalty from the links. I know the site has no manual action against it becuase I sent in a reconsideration request and they said no manual action was taken against the site.
What do you think? Is the site just serving a time out in the sandbox because of the big influx of links? It's been about 3 months now since the site started to drop.