We have a relatively new site and I guess the sandbox applies as we cannot get good serps currently. I can use 8,000 "points" weight from another site: A) Will the keywords I use get better serps even if I am sandboxed? B) Will google blacklist me as I will get back links too quickly for a new site? C) Is it worth concentrating on 2 or 3 keyword (phrases) or should you have a much larger (25 keywords or more???) selection of keywords? Does G count the back links for a particular phrase or is it the total back links for ALL keywords?
a) The sandbox is where google doesn't factor in your back links for SERP placement, so your SERPS will not change as the back links will not be counted for ranking purposes. The back links will show up, and PR is still passed during the sandbox. If your site is less than 3 months old, you are almost certainly in the sandbox. b) IMO, gaining too many backlinks in a short period of time does not look "natural" and I believe it can hurt you. I have never seen a black list if you mean "ban" from google, but I think a penalty can be applied in rankings. At best, it doesn't help. I don't think there is a known magic number of "too many backlinks", and it would also depend on how relevant the back links are to your site. Backlinks from relevant sites are much better than unrelated backlinks. Google is constantly tweaking their algorithm so it's hard to know if something you specifically did was responsible for an increase or decrease in rankings i.e. I recently had a keyword which I was ranking #7 for the last 5 months. I added a small amount of co-op weight to that specific page in an attempt to increase the ranking. The ranking has now dropped to 170's but that doesn't mean the co-op did it. I did remove the page from the co-op a little over a week ago and haven't seen any change as of yet. c) The reporting of back links are a total, not counted per phrase. Hope that helps.