SEO The Sandbox and the Overoptimization Filter

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

Before today if someone asked me I would have said on page optimization is crap, and nobody needs to do it. I change this statement now and say onpage optimization will not get you good rankings, but it will absolutley blast your site if you do too much of it. See I didn’t think that Google would weight the factors within my control so much, when it comes to improving rankings, they may not, but boy they will just delete you right out if you are over optimized. The only problem I have is I have now dropped in my rankings on MSN because they like high densitys. Thats ok though, I want a good position on Google, I will get MSN later.

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.