Avoiding the Sandbox

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I am acutely aware of "The Google Sandbox"  due to experimenting with link wheels in the past.  Fortunately I created the wheel using all the usual suspects, ie Hub Page, Squidoo, Scribd plus various article sites and web pages created on free templates.

I created it manually over a couple of weeks but despite this our site was thrown into oblivion.  By mapping my wheel I quickly disconnected the interlinking pages so that only relevant links pointing to the Free Classifieds remained.  The website returned to page 1 Google within a couple of hours.

Consequently I am very guarded against using any SEO company that utilises black or grey hat SEO methods on Fiverr.  I had researched one technique which appears to work but I have been unable to ascertain if its blackhat.  

Finally I bit the bullet and utilised a Fiverr gig to see what would happen with one of my least important keywords.  So far I have been thrown out of reach of Google for this keyword which previously existed on page 10.  Interestingly my other keywords are totally unaffected and we remain on page 1 and 2 for the ones we depend upon.

Does this mean I am sandboxed?  Any good SEO usually results in a temporary drop in SERP - usually not this drastic.  So now I await to see if this drastic drop will see either an incredible recovery or if it has cost me.  I conclude that whatever the result I have more confidence implementing techniques for less important search phrases knowing that my site has not been affected.

Clearly I would not knowingly implement black hat techniques since I still do not know if this is one.  If it is white hat then I have nothing to fear and this could be the reason why the site has not disapeared altogether.

This is all academic since it could be that the last time Free Classifieds was "Sandboxed" could have been temporary whilst Google checked out the links.  It makes me a little nervous that we can upset the search engines this way.  It makes better sense that if Google can see the evidence of black hat marketing, then it should disregard the links altogether so that only time or money is wasted.  Otherwise does this not make our websites vulnerable to our competitors or unscrupulous SEO companies?

I await the results of SERP and will publish them accordingly along with the method used.

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