I should probably have clarified my post but I was rushing and was on my way out when I made my last post. From my experience it takes different amounts of time to get out of the sandbox depending on the industry and the competitiveness of the keyword. For keywords like casinos and online casinos I have seen up to 3 years. For less competitive terms I have seen as low as 1 year.
Truth is I dont think google is the traffic goldmine that everyone claims it is so I dont even worry about this search engine. I target yahoo and msn.
I’m not sure if the sandbox is related to outbound links. I have websites that have no affiliate links on them that are still in the sandbox. Sometimes the sandbox exists for far longer than it should for how competitive a certain keyword is. I might be in the minority but I think that after a certain while, once incoming links, on page seo, etc is factored, there’s a huge randomness factor in which websites rank, and how high they rank. The only thing that can be done at this point in build more websites. It’s frustrating.
The one thing that I have noticed of which is not important is comtent. Dont waste your time on it until you have a website ranking. This was my biggest initial mistake, i wasted too much time on creating content for a minority of websites. Only bother with this once you get traffic.
As for selling out… I’m sure you can make a comeback. The same set of skills is required. SEO is just as easy it just takes more patience. I still dont have the skills that most webmasters have, I cant program, not even html, I cant web design properly, etc
Just build websites and dont worry about google for now.