Hi, Just launched a site a couple of months ago - see signature. It's newly registered. Was ranked #1 in Google for the site name but I think my keywords are rather competitive! Are the keywords everyone talks about those that are placed into the meta tags? I've now vanished completely from Google although there are a few backlinks found. Could someone please me if the site is indeed in the Sandbox, thanks.
The sandbox is a filter that stops your site ranking for the competitive keywords you are targetting. Bearing in mind MSN is only showing 7 links you are not in the sandbox. You just don't have enough links to rank yet. Google is also only indexing one page from your site. What keywords are you targetting?
Thanks mad4. Am I right in saying that keywords are placed in metatags? The keyword "squidlinks" (and the name of my site) used to return my site in google at #1 but now it's not listed at all directly! How can you tell if it's only indexing one page? And if so is that because I have not done something properly? Thanks
The keywords can be placed anywhere. When people talk about keywords its the ones that you are targetting and want to rank for. For example if you have a site about insurance you want to rank high for the terms "car insurance", "motor insurance" etc. I assume that very few people search for squidlinks so there is little point in targetting that term. Search google for site:www.squidlinks.com to see how many pages it has indexed. With so few links its going to be hard for you to get more pages in the index.
The answer is that with so few links you will struggle to get a stable presence in google. Google needs to see some good, authoritative links to your site for it to be kept in the index and indexed deeply.