I had to put something down to give people some information. Daily I get questions on the Google Sandbox and the filters like the overoptimization filter that Google is rumored to have. I just had to come out with something that showed the results of my tests. I think that this could help some people, especially new SEOs identify if their site has some problems.

I think it is best if I address the Sandbox first. It is easy because I don’t believe it exists. If it does exist I have found the magical way around it with all of my sites. I don’t know what this way is because I have done different things in the beginning with each one of my sites, but within 3 months for any keyword I am getting on page two or even page one. I put up 3 new sites in November and all three are in the top 30 of Google, one is on page one, and the other is on page two, and we are going to talk about site three in the over optimization filter section of this article.

I am not sure I dont believe the Sandbox exists, however I know for a fact that there are methods to getting around it, even though I cant say definitively what they are. I mean how could 3 of my sites jump to page one if there was a sandbox within a month or two? If there is truly a sandbox filter, or a method that gets you put in it, I missed out on it with three sites, so maybe my methods are just superior to everyone out there who says there is a sandbox.

Now the overoptimization filter. Let’s just be blunt, if your site is overoptimized in Google’s eyes they will completley destroy your rankings. They will literally kill your site. Bye Bye good ranking, hello I am not in the index at all. Here is what I did. On week 2 of new website that was fantastic, I was on page one in the number five position. Best ranking ever in that short amount of time. Oh it was lovely. Then along came Mr. Overoptimization and he slit my throat. My site disappeared one day, and I don’t mean from page one, I mean from the whole index. I wasn’t even on page one when I searched for my domain name with 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 took a huge weight off my shoulders. I moved right up from not being indexed to position 100 by changing 4 words. Now I have made another change because I still want to reduce my keyword density. I found that my personal keyword density was about 4%. This came from all my forum reading. These Joe Blows, who probably don’t even have a ranking for anything saying it should be between 3 and 7%. When I looked at the top 10 sites for my keyword, none of them, for the phrase, even have a density of 1%. I have a lot of work to do, but I am doing it one step at a time so I can see what works.

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 everyone out there worried or talking about this Sandbox, if you think you are in it, you better try on page optimization because I am almost willing to bet you are over optimized, not in the sandbox. Especially if you havent been indexed in 6 months. I would be checking my strategies if what I was doing was not helping me get up there in 6 months. Every site I have had has made at least page 2 for competitive keywords in about 2 months.

Here is a tip from me. Don’t link to anybody. What? That’s right. I have several websites, they don’t link to eachother and they don’t link to anybody else. The reason? I know I can be punished if I link to someone that links to someone that sucks. Therefore instead of leaving my destiny in there hands, I just don’t link to anybody including myself.

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