Not sure what that online tool checks to see if you've been penalised. Assuming it searches Google for your domain name. In any case, it doesn't mean your site has been sandboxes or penalised though. Do you track your rankings at all? If you saw some sudden drops recently, could be due to the panda refresh that rolled out last week.

Were there any footprints between the blogs you created and your site? If you host them on the same IP or same who is information and so on, could be you got a penalty for unnatural link building. You can check through WMT if you have any sort of manual penalty placed on your site.

Kinda strange, your first post is linking to a tool I've never heard of before. Spam?

That tool is an inaccurate piece of crap.

If it's inaccurate, anything else out there better to check sites with? The tool successfully flagged a couple of sites I knew- (as best I could ever know - to have been penalised as a pre-using-check and 90% of sites pass as would be expected.

The blogs were wordpress, blogger and tumblr to keep them apart from my site.

But mainly I want to know how others promote their sites these days, Google seems to be closing all avenues for small businesses down.

Sandbox checker?

Do they have a reality checker?

Try:

• site:domain.com
• site:domain.com/internal-page-url

I agree, that tool is horrible.

Why would anyone even consider using it?

And yes, a bit spammy

Lol, why do you think they are penalised?Just because a useless tool told you so? Did your traffic drop? Such tools are pointless and shouldn't be used at all.

If you want to know whether your blogs have been penalised or not, view their impressions over the last couple of days/weeks. You can get this information from your Google webmaster tools account. If the number of daily impressions they are receiving per day has dropped steeply, then the tool is correct. If not, it isn't.

That kind of tool can never be correct anyway as it doesn't have access to the data needed to produce accurate results.

I guess that tool is not showing the right result, I checked my site in that tool, (ticketgoose.com),one time its shown as penalized, second time as it looks OK. I suggest you not believe in these tools, check out your traffic volume of the blog, is there any sudden drop? OR did you get any message in your Google webmaster tools regarding any manual penalty?

I have checked online tools and seen that many of them give inaccurate results. So just make sure that what link you build they are quality links. Submit to quality and verified directories.