sandbox and competitors

[SeoPro2005]

It is not possible to rank high in google.com without pr or inbound links.

[wavedancing]

No, it can't. Do you think its easy to program?
As I said the sure thing is max two words run together. On very rare ocassions I saw three words run together recognized by Google.

Activeco,

that's off the topic. But I think that's interesting. I have a entry page for my site wavedancing.net which is http://chinesesymboltattoo.auctioninsights.com .

This page is ranked well for keywords "tattoo picture", "chinese symbol", "chinese symbol for tattoo".

It used to ranked well on "tattoo design" but now it's in the second page.

It's easy to add "-" at the file name for me. But I am not sure it's really necessary.

[activeco]

It's easy to add "-" at the file name for me. But I am not sure it's really necessary.

That's a good question.
It seems that Google does not value allinurl extremly high regarding SERPS, but... many other engines do.
Besides, it won't harm. I strongly believe that a site having thousands potential keywords hidden in urls must do considerably better by revealing them.
Unless that requires a lot of work in changing links pointing to the pages.

Also, one probably should be carefull with such a move, by doing it gradually, as the changing all the links to altered urls at once, could possibly trigger G spam filter - too many links in short period of time.

[DannyS]

So if your site is gone for some listings on Google it is called sandboxed ?.

No.

There is a big difference between "the sandbox" and "ranking poorly" - most sites I have looked at that claim to be sandboxed, just rank poorly.

IMHO, a sandboxed site is:
1) New domain - probably since March or so of this year
2) On page SEO is OK, but not overdone
3) Good number of links, esp with keyword(s) in anchor text
4) Googlebot crawls often
5) Most/many pages are indexed
6) Ranks well for obscure terms
7) Ranks very well for the allins for main keyword (important criteria)
8) Does not rank in top 700 or so for term that its optimized for.
9) Absence of anything that could attract a penalty.

CBP

I do wonder if the sandbox is just a symptom of the Florida and Austin updates. If we changed the date of CBP’s criteria number one back to mid 2003 it would fit most of our sites that suffered as Google changed the algorithm. I suspect it would be fairly easy for Google to put a dampening filter on sudden changes which would benefit older sites and slow down the rise of newer sites. What we do get back to is that one way or another, Google treats some keyword phrases different to others; (CBP’s criteria number eight). Whether it’s a filter, a lookup table that determines which algorithm is used, or something else doesn’t really matter that much. What it means to those launching new sites into popular keyword phrases is more time needs to be allowed before significant results show up.

Our new site www.my-animal-figurine.com which just missed the last PR update shows all the signs CBP listed except it has now got up to the 190s in main keyword, animal figurines. It is first for the allintext and allinanchor but we did see this on other sites at the beginning of the year. We have more new sites that fit exactly what we are seeing with this one so it is repeatable. I think we just have to believe it will eventually come good;-)

A strange thing that I have seen before but not really logged until now is that while this sandbox is going on you can get strange results from pages you didn’t aim at being in the listings at all. Our login page on a shared SSL server URL moves up the listings quicker than the pages we are working on, despite having a grayed out Page Rank toolbar. I don’t really want to put a link to it here, but look at the results for “miniature animal figurines” and in the first 10 you will see what I mean. The home page trails this by at least 30 positions. (I know I should use a robots.txt file but I’m not sure on some the shared SSL quite how this works as in this case the root of the secure server URL isn’t the same as the site’s root; there is an extra sub-directory.) When I saw this before eventually the SSL pages were replaced by the normal pages. I have no idea whether the above is connected with either the sandbox or the new algorithm.

Going back to Florida and Austin, it would be interesting to know if the majority of the sites that suffered at that time were less than one year old and those that didn’t were older established sites.

Danny

[wavedancing]

DannyS, I guess your site is similiar to my site http://www.animalbirdfigurine.com. Recently my site is ranked in top ten for a lot of keywords at Yahoo. But it's still "sandboxed" by Google.

[DannyS]

DannyS, I guess your site is similiar to my site http://www.animalbirdfigurine.com. Recently my site is ranked in top ten for a lot of keywords at Yahoo. But it's still "sandboxed" by Google.

I think there is an age dampening factor in the algorithm. Just a question of how long to wait I'm afraid.

Danny