I wanted to get this down on paper today because I have done a lot of tests to find out if there is a Sandbox or overoptimization filter when it comes to Google. I have done a bunch of tests and I finally have the results I want where I feel I can give a good opinion on what you can do. I want to help out those, who are especially new to the game.

The Sandbox is the easy one to address. There are two things I can say about it. The two things are that either it does not exist, or I have figured out the most magical formula to bypass it, but I don’t know what it is. I read these forums where people say they are in the sandbox for six or even twelve months. I want those people to know that I feel something else is wrong with their site, I put up 3 new sites in November, and by January I was on the first page of Google. May I also add that these were brand new domains, and before being on page one they were on page two or three in just a few weeks.

I don’t know if the Sandbox exists or not. It is like being 8 and questioning Santa Clause. I am not sure if it is there or not, but as long as I continue to believe then I am careful, or in the Santa Clause instance I get presents. Now I would love to come out and say it doesn’t exist because I would probably be the only SEO that would make such a claim. All I know is that I either have a superior method to all the people that talk about the Sandbox, or people talking about it have other problems than just some sandbox.

Now we go to overoptimization, I am sure this exisits, and this won’t just hurt your rankings it will bomb your rankings. The overoptimization filter is like an atom bomb to a website. The good news, it is easily fixable and you will see rankings improvement in a few days. Here was my test for that. I had a very competitive keyword, two weeks after launching my site I was number five on Google, great promotion, everything going good, then one day I searched just because I do that every day because I am so proud of myself, and the site was gone. I don’t mean it had dropped from page one, I mean it was gone from the index. I went through every page of Google for that keyword and it was gone. When I searched for my domain name including the dot com I didn’t even rank on the first page for that.

My first thought was oh darn after all this luck of not having a site in the sandbox it got me. Well I guess that site is done for 6 months or more, so I kept link building but I did nothing to the site. One day it will just jump out of the sandbox to number one. I also decided that it was possible that all my sites may have this happen, and then what? I freaked, I was watching my rankings all the time, I would even go to the page my site was on and sit there for 5 minutes and refresh it just to make sure the site stayed. After about a month I decided I didn’t care, I wasn’t waiting 6 months, I would make some changes to the site, if that didn’t work, new domain start over, because I had beat the sandbox with 2 other domains. I made one little change. I had my main keywords in an H1 tag at the top of my site, I changed it, I took my keywords out. A few days later when Google cached my site… I was back in the index. I wasn’t sandboxed, afterall, I overoptimized the site.

Now I am not watching my rankings so close. I know that the problem with this particular site was that it was overoptimized not sandboxed as I had assumed. I moved this site back into the index by changing 4 words. I jumped over 16 million positions changing four words. I had to make another change though, because 100 position sucks, and I am still overoptimized. See in my forum reading I started beliving these yahoo’s (people not search engine) that said my key word density should be between 3 and 7 percent. When I looked at my competition they are between 0 and 1%. I was over 4%. Now I have to work to keep reducing my density and as I do that I expect my rankings will continue to improve.

Up until this time I have been a firm believer in off page optimization, my theory has always been that there is no way they can weight on page optimization that much because it is so controllable by the webmaster. What I have learned in return is that on page cant help too incredibly much, but it can kill your site. Pay attention to the density of top sites and do your best to fit in those numbers. If you are over optimized kiss your income and your site good-bye on Google. The problem: MSN and Yahoo reward key word density so in increasing my rankings in Google I have partially damaged my MSN and Yahoo rankings, but I think it is worth it. I want to be on top of Google then worry about MSN and Yahoo.

So to those people in the forums stating that they have been sandboxed for 6 months, change your strategy. There is no way that Google is holding you back for 6 months but putting my sites on in 2 weeks. I am no different than you. I don’t know Matt Cutts and I don’t have ANY clue what the algorithim is. But I do get to page 2 sometimes within weeks of launching new sites. So if someone told me this, I would be going back to my site saying ok what am I doing wrong here.

Oh yeah also, don’t contact me to link to your site. One of my major linking strategies is I do not exchange links, nor do I put a single outbound link on my site even to one of my own sites. Why? As far as I have seen anybody in the universe can link to my site and it doesn’t hurt me, but I can get a penalty for linking to someones site. Therefore I don’t link out to anybody.

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