I just wanted to write something up to give some people some guidance. I get a lot of questions daily on the Sandbox and the Overoptimization filter on Google posed by my clients. I really wanted to address if they exist and how to fix any problems you may have. I have done some tests and finally have results that clear some things up for me.

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 can’t say for sure that there is no Sandbox, even though I like to, because it is different from most of what you read, and I love to be different and cause a fuss. I will say however, that my three sites all got to the top with no problem so I either have really good luck, or I just can get around it. If there is a sandbox I missed it with three sites, so maybe it is just that my methods are better than everyone on the forums that talk about this horrible sandbox.

Now as for the overoptimization filter, that does exist, and it will hammer you. I had a site that I started promoting and had excellent results. I was about number 5 on Google for my keywords, and then one day, I was gone. I dont mean gone like moved down, I mean gone. I didnt even rank number one for a search for my domain name including the dot com.

Right away I screamed Sandbox, read everything I could on it, and accepted that I would not be ranked for six months. I then pulled half of my hair out wondering if my other sites would drop like that too. As a matter of fact I obsessed over my rankings sometimes checking them hourly just to make sure they were still somewhere close to page one. You know Google rankings change a lot, I learned this during my little breakdown. After about a month of inaction because I assumed Sandbox I boldly made a move. At the top of my site in my H1 tags I had my keywords, I changed that tag, took the keywords out of it. A few days later, though not number one because I still am overoptimized, I was in position 100. Guess what? I wasn’t sandboxed, I overoptimized.

The results of this test were impressive. I jumped from not being indexed to being just over position 100. I have since made another change reducing my keyword density some more. I found that my keyword density for my main keywords was about 4% which people in forums, who I dont believe know a lot, say is good, somewhere between 3-7 percent. The sites ranked for this keyword have a density for the phrase somewhere between 0-1%. I am now waiting to see what this reduction does for my rankings.

Until today really, I was a believer that no matter what, it made no difference what was on your site, if you had a good method of building links, which I do, you would rank well in Google. The reason is I didn’t think Google could weigh much on what a webmaster could control. What I really learned is that changes to your page may not improve your rankings a great deal if you are already ranked good, but they sure can kill your page. You have to watch the density of your competitors and test out what modifying the density does for your rankings. If you overoptimize for any term, your site will get blasted there is no doubt. My major problem is to get a good ranking on Google I had to lower my density which was doing real good on MSN. I think though that I can handle MSN, because all my sites still rank better there than they do on Google.

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.

My secret tip of the day, what do I do so differently? Here is one… I don’t link to anybody. I don’t exchange links nor do my sites have a single outbound link on them. Why? Because I know for sure that I can be punished for people that I link to, but not for the people that link to me. Therefore I just don’t link to anybody and I avoid this issue.

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