Now the problem that I ran into was that all of my sites were getting sandboxed. I mean all of them. I was busting out WP blogs with content I wrote myself, and started link building. I am well aware of link building red flags and I knew to do this slowly so I didn’t fuck myself over. But a new site I made two weeks ago only has 66 links and was still sandboxed. I was starting to go nuts and lose hope for this idea of getting any seo traction for anything. It felt as if I had wasted a few hundred dollars and well over a weeks of time! How did they know to sandbox everything I made? I am in like 40 different niches with different themes, scripts, wordpress, and non-wp sites.. How…the fuck.

This weekend I really started to look into the matter since its going to seriously kill my income if nothing I do can get ranked anywhere. Based on the information I had the only thing I could think of is that Google is either targeting me personally e.g. Name, Addy etc (though most sites have private whois, thanks namecheap), my namesever, or my ip. This is the only way they can cast out this broad net and catch most everything I make.

So assuming Google doesn’t have the power to find my name/company and all traces of my personal info on domain whois I passed this idea up. I am sure they CAN do it, but that’s a lot of fucking work on their end and I am quite a small fish. So if its not my name its my host/ns/ip.

I have been using a old hostgator account for like 5yrs for most new projects since it was easy to just addon new sites. $10.00 unlimited domains and SQL it was a nice setup. I think I had about 200 domains setup in that account and like 50 subdomains from various projects that I have done over the last 5yrs. Could they actually be the problem? I did a IP neighbors check on one of my old sites to see what all else was in there. What I noticed was a lot of garbage. Pure garbage everywhere… It seems everyone loves these $10 hosting accounts and just uses them for affiliate sites and spam. I didn’t see 1 legit looking site on my entire server with them. After seeing this it kinda made it seem as if I was not as crazy as I thought. I mean if you knew of a server ip range that was known for bullshit why not flag it? Its not like google cares about your business or anything they can do whatever they want.

So last night I had enough and did a full transfer using cpanel from hostgator to a new hosting account. (Btw, that transfer tool in cpanel is amazing.) I changed over all my info with my registers and went to sleep. If I woke up in the morning and my sites didn’t work id know something went wrong… After waking up and going about my business I made sure the transfer went alright and checked that everything was in order. So when will i know if I was right or not?

Well 10mins ago just out of curiosity I checked the serps for a keyword I was targeting. The site I had made got to like page 5 and then was removed from the first 20 pages.. that thing was long dead and gone. So I check the keyword.. and WTF!!! My site is now ranked #1 for my term overnight. A few other things happened to this domain so its hard to tell right now which one caused my site to go from sandbox to #1 but I think it was the hosting move. It is way to early to state the facts, nothing happens overnight. But this site having such a drastic change in its rankings has made me kinda wonder.. Ill continue to moniter things and see what happens and post a update at a later date to see the out come after a longer period of time.

Slight Update 4/6/2009:

The site that I mentioned in the post now holds the #1 and #2 positions for its keyword. So its gone from no serp ranking to 1 and 2 overnight.