[What are some suggestions to get sites out of the Google sandbox, that are a good few months old but still showing no signs of the ranking?]
Click your heels together three times, and say to yourself there’s no place like my homepage.
The “sandbox” only exists in your imagination. Do whatever it takes to imagine it doesn’t exist and you are free from it.
Your page has not been placed in a sandbox penalty (there is no such thing). You earn your page’s rank by creating content that is extremely relevant to your targeted keyword and promoting it throughout the community of users that might be interested.
If you are not ranking well then you probably have not done the above as well as your competitors.
I have acknowledged that it (the sandbox) does indeed exist within our own minds. I have also acknowledged that Google uses trust as a factor in ranking and trust is earned over time. The point is that there is nothing you can do to trigger the sandbox effect, nor is there anything you can do to prevent it. Every new webpage that is ever published must earn trust just like any other.
While yes there are indeed penalties that Google serves out when you make serious violations of their webmaster guidelines, those penalties involve the removal of trust which affects the value of your outbound links towards other pages or the complete removal of your website from their index.
