When thinking about how Google's manual penalties operate, it's easy to have questions about both process & personal disgression. The most common explanation and the one I personally believe, is that Google uses an algorithm that measures link popularity gain and flags particular sites that stand out as having "unnatural" link structures - either in terms of speed of link gain, or location of the incoming links. Once the site has been flagged, a Google employee (probably someone on the team associated with the email address [email protected]) manually reviews the site to determine if the site is "worthy" of the rankings associated with the links.

If this is the case, how does Google decide that Gary Brolsma shouldn't be sandboxed, but your landscaping design site should be. A deep grokking of Google's goals and intent should reveal the answer. Google wants to rank Gary Brolsma because they know it's something people are looking for and want to find. Your landscaping site, on the other hand, doesn't have anything unique from the 30 other landscapers in your town, or th 50,000 other landscapers in your state, so why give you a boost.

In order to get around issues like this, I propose that websites seeking to gain link popularity quickly need at least one, and preferably multiple pieces of phenomenal, unique content - a funny flash movie about landscaping accidents, a page with the most bizzarre, beautiful or wild landscapes in the world, an interactive landscaping map that lets you drag and drop pieces of masonry, plant life & water features onto a virtual landscape. This kind of great content is what can make an unnatural link structure "seem" natural, and what's even better - it can actually build a real, natural link structure, too.