Hi, I have done numerous checks to find out if my site, www.itreallyisfree.com is sandboxed, but I am not qualified enough to tell, my main keyword is 'free iphone 3g' and I rank about 127 for that on google, my second keyword is 'free iphone' but I don't even rank for that on any of the 3 major search engines. I have 1,757 inlinks according to yahoo, I know it's not many but it should be enough to rank higher than 127 for my main keyword, as a few of my competitors on page 1 for the same keyword have less inlinks than me! so please could someone do a quick check for me as you are likely to know a lot more than me. Thanks in advance!
Thanks for your reply, I realize this but evan so my site should be ranked much better. By the way I made a mistake. A few days aggo my site was ranked 127 but now I can't even find it on the SERPS!
Google never did crawl all sites equally. The amount of PageRank in a site has always affected how often a site is crawled. But they've now added links to the criteria, and for the first time they are dumping a site's pages OUT of the index if it doesn't have a good enough score. What sense is there in dumping perfectly good and useful pages out of the index? If they are in, leave them in. Why remove them? What difference does it make if a site has only one link pointing to it or a thousand links pointing to it? Does having only one link make it a bad site that people would rather not see? If it does, why index ANY of it's pages? Nothing makes any sort of sense. So we now have the situation where Google intentionally leaves "fine" and useful pages out of their index, simply because the sites haven't attracted enough links to them. It is grossly unfair to website owners, especially to the owners of small websites, most of whom won't even know that they are being treated so unfairly, and it short-changes Google's users, since they are being deprived of the opportunity to find many useful pages and resources. So what now? Google has always talked against doing things to websites and pages, solely because search engines exist. But what can website owners do? Those who aren't aware of what's happening to their sites simply lose - end of story. Those who are aware of it are forced into doing something solely because search engines exist. They are forced to contrive unnatural links to their sites - something that Google is actually fighting against - just so that Google will treat them fairly. Incidentally, link exchanges are no good, because Matt also said that too many reciprocal links causes the same negative effect. The effect being that the site isn't crawled as often, and fewer pages from the site are indexed. It's a penalty. There is no other way to see it. If a site is put on the Web, and the owner doesn't go in for search engine manipulation by doing unnatural link-building, the site gets penalised by not having all of its pages indexed. It can't be seen as anything other than a penalty. Is that the way to run a decent search engine? Not in my opinion it isn't. Do Google's users want them to leave useful pages and resources out of the index, just because they haven't got enough links pointing to them? I don't think so. As a Google user, I certainly don't want to be short-changed like that. It is sheer madness to do it. The only winners are those who manipulate Google by contriving unnatural links to their sites. The filthy linking rich get richer, and the link-poor get poorer - and pushed by Google towards spam methods. Google's new crawling/indexing system is lunacy. It is grossly unfair to many websites that have never even tried to manipulate the engine by building unnatural links to their sites, and it is very bad for Google's users, who are intentionally deprived of the opportunity to find many useful pages and resources. Google people always talk about improving the user's experience, but now they are intentionally depriving their users. It is sheer madness! What's wrong with Google indexing decent pages, just because they are there? Doesn't Google want to index all the good pages for their users any more? It's what a search engine is supposed to do, it's what Google's users expect it to do, and it's what Google's users trust it to do, but it's not what Google is doing. At the time of writing, the dropping of pages is continuing with a vengeance, and more and more perfectly good sites are being affected. A word about Matt Cutts Matt is a senior software engineer at Google, who currently works on the spam side of things. He is Google's main spam man. He communicates with the outside world through his blog, in which he is often very helpful and informative. Personally, I believe that he is an honest person. I have a great deal of respect for him, and I don't doubt anything that he says, but I accept that he frequently has to be economical with the truth. He may agree or disagree with some or all of the overwhelming outside opinion concerning Google's new crawl/index function, but if he agrees with any of it, he cannot voice it publically. This article isn't about Matt Cutts, or his views and opinions; it is about what Google is doing. The thread in Matt's blog where all of this came to light is here mattcutts.com/blog/indexing-timeline/.
Thanks, a very informative reply, I agree that this is grossly unfair, but it still doesn't explain why my site ranks so bad on all the search engines!
Thank you for that information. I never knew that. I still agree with emid123 though, 2000 links and not even top 100? But its all about QUALITY > QUANTITY
you're not sandboxed. Your may however have been penalised. Add a few quality links in-bound only. It's a real bugger, 2 years ago, I built what was then a 3 year old site into one now receiving over 600 unique IP visits per day and about 20,000 hits per day. Thing is, I built it purely on loads of in-bound links, some quality and many directories. My latest site is a much harder nut to crack and it's down to 5 main reasons: Quality of content, refreshing the content, adding new content frequently, good relevant high quality in bound links. Finally, one very good idea is to steer clear of any links to or from your website that are simply linked keywords with limited or no anchor text. Linkedd keywords are now seen as being paid adverts and I've seen some of my sites dropped simply because they link through to some of my other sites.
thank you both for your help, Richard, My site could of been penalized, thanks for pointing this out. You have been very helpful, Think I am going to start fresh with a whole new site =)
hi emid i think you have to get better PR and generate multi sitemap like ( xml , html , php , ror ) put it above the footer and you will be google friend