Sandbox effect?

[Christophera]

I have two sites I am promoting. Both with popular keyword phrases.

Site 1 is about 7 years old. When I started my current backlink building campaign, this site had about 30 backlinks gained over the last seven years.

Site 2 is 5 months old and had no backlinks when I got started.

I built 300+ backlinks for both sites over the last two months. The backlinks are all on the same pages, so that factor is identical.

Site 1 went from a google listing around 200 to 10 (first page, yea!).

Site 2 still hasn't broken into the first 1000 for it's key phrase.

I know that site 2 is in google. It will rank number 1 for an obscure keyword, but for the popular key phrase it just doesn't show up at all.

Is this the 'sandbox' effect? Site 1 is older, and had a few old backlinks, so it responded faster to the new backlinks I've built?

Do I just wait..... and how long... before I know if this is going to work for site 2?

Continuing to build links, but wanted to get feedback.

Thanks,

Chris

[jawn_tech]

Perhaps you should also mention this in the thread about the age of sites being a factor in Google's algorithm, and see what they say. Someone is asserting the possibility that G likes older sites better, but how better more is uncertain.

About waiting, 5 months should have been plenty for a few Google index and PR updates of your site, at the very least.

Possibly, maybe it's not the age. Without seeing the sites it's hard to tell if it's on Google's end, or perhaps the older site was just optimized better? Other things considered would be # of competitors for site 2, or maybe there's something about site 2 googlebot is having trouble with associating relevancy. All that aside, assuming they are built in the same manner, it does seem strange site 2's results are that drastically different than the first.