I’m making my first attempt at building a website from scratch, having done some work as writer for the web and dipped my toe here and there. I decided to have a go at building a dedicated site for this new lottery launching in Europe this week.

I seem to have been sandboxed, initially having made the first page for the name of the lottery and then hitting obscurity overnight. Googling in desperation I found this post and have applied some of your advice, having gone over things I think I built links too fast and too focused on specific keywords (experimenting with UAW), forgetting to include ‘click here’ and such.

I have since tried to create more link variation as you suggest but have not succeeded in bringing the site back. In the meantime I’ve found myself frequenting your site to read from the endless wealth of material on offer and come to notice that you sometimes give people’s sites ‘a look over’ – offering insights and advice. Should you find yourself with a bit of time on your hands, I would be most grateful for any tips you could offer on mine.

Many thanks for the site, it is great!

Now it was about 6-8 days that my webpage was penalized. I checked and it was definitely penalized. So after 6-8 days with the penalty i sent about 20-30 links all with “junk” anchor text, so to speak, such as “sitename” ect. It has probably been around 3 days or so since i sent the “junk” links to even out the anchor text profile. Now, i will most likely have everything back to normal by the time you get to answer this, but at least others can gain from this comment anyway right? What i am seeing is quite interesting. Since the “junk” links hit and evened out the anchor text profile for the webpage, i have checked and the penalty is definitely gone from the page.

What i am seeing seems like a gradual shift in the ranings. The page was ranking for about 14 or so keywords all on the first page from positions 2-7. So far since the penalty has vanished about 4 keywords have returned to positions slightly worse than what they were when the penalty was first applied. All of the other keywords are still anywhere from position 385-785 in Google. It seems as if the keywords are slowly returning to their formal positions one by one.

I am not sure how your page was setup, but it is interesting to see what is happening day by day since the penalty has been lifted. I am wondering if possibly the penalty has actually hurt the rankings since it has been in place for so long. I am wondering if you experienced the same “gradual” return of your rankings, and if they were affected negatively or positively since the penalty was lifted. With all of the keywords stuffed links that i had smashing this page when the penalty was applied you would think the rankings for this page would return holding #1 spots in Google. It is funny because, for about a full month during the linkbuilding campaign for this webpage, the rankings had all hit the first page but seemed to be stagnant for a full month, while other pages receiving the same type of promotion were flying up the rankings.

I just try to learn everything that i can as i move along, and in the process maybe others can benefit from deciphering these types of things. It would be nice to have the whole Google algorithm uncovered, but in reality the closest we can get as Internet marketers to that is little bits and pieces of information. I look forward to your reply.

Your blog is very Informative.

I am curious what has become of your Linkaloha site. You said it had been thrown into the ‘sandbox’, like the others, and you were going to try to revive it using the same method that you used on the BMR site.

Have you had a chance to attempt to revive the Linkaloha site using this method? Thanks in advance.

Luckily i found this website from WF and used your technique… it works like charm. I don’t really count the %, I just add new different keywords everyday and the site crawl back to where it belongs. #1

I suspect that my sites were sandboxed because of sudden increase in links due to aggressive UAW submission.

Now I can’t say 100% for sure since you can never be sure that a search engine has found and counted your link.

You can use a tool like Yahoo Site Explorer or Majestic SEO to find at least a sample of the backlinks to your site.