I'm at a loss on this one. This is a serious puzzle. My site, www.hybridcarguide.com is 9 months old, has been completely indexed by the majors and ranks very well for high volume terms (hybrid car) on MSN and Yahoo. It's not in the top 700 in Google. If I search Google allinanchor, allinurl, allintitle, even allintext I'm on the first page for the term hybrid car. Actually, I don't show up for any of my search terms on Google other than the site name, and I have many strong listings on Yahoo & MSN. My hosting is shared, and I have a site wide link on another site which has the same IP. However, this is not reciprocal so I think it shouldn't matter. I do not link out to any bad neighborhoods, and have no outbound links that are off topic. I have only one theory - I changed hosts exactly 6 months ago, before I was out of the sandbox. I remember reading later that a new IP will reset the sandbox counter. My site didn't rank for 'hybrid car guide' on Google (top few hundred) until about a month ago. But isn't the sandbox release a big unveiling? Shouldn't the entire site come out at once, not a term at a time? Is there anything else I could have done/be doing wrong that's causing this ridiculous discrepancy in results among engines?! Thanks so much for the help.
Marketleap shows you only have a bit over 500 backlinks. You need much more to get a good rank, there are over 4 million other pages targeting that keyword, so it is quite competitive.
I know I may not have as many backlinks as some of the competition, but Yahoo and MSN look at backlinks, too. Backlinks alone cannot explain the engine results discrepancy. Here's why: When I search on Google for Hybrid Car, showing 100 results per page, and Ctrl+F for hybridcarguide.com I see these listings: My own Google Directory listing. My own listing in other directories. (note I do not see my own site) Certainly my site is more optimized for the term 'hybrid car' than a directory that includes the title of my site, 'hybrid car guide' Is Google penalizing for sitewide inbound links? What else might it be?
That's comparing apples with pears. They are authority sites most likely. You are not (yet). Their rankings could be explained with quality OBLs. They might even have more relevant IBLs (you didn't mention this). Backlinks CAN explain the 'discrepancy'. Get more quality (not site-wide) links to get you going in Google.