Made it back to page 1 today for 3 of my 2 keyword phrases. Sandboxed for approx 3 weeks. I wrote some original content and added a few links then voila. Hopefully it will stay. So it does come back after all if you were once there even for new sites/blogs. Relevant generic style domain name with decent content filled with keywords, add to a few directories, get indexed, i'm w/adsense and I made it to page 1 for the 2nd time in 3 months. I own 100 .coms all within the same niche. Should I foward all of them to this blog now? For $50 investment it seems logical. They are parked with uniques but they are low and limited ppc if any at present however as my niche grows so will traffic. Is a website better to monetize then a blog? Is there restrictions blogs have compared to websites? cheers!
I don't believe in this sandbox... I'll admit I don't have much experience with websites, I was, and am, a journalist before an internet writer, but I joined the herd and am trying to see if I can make it on my own without having the corporate people breathing down my neck with the pressures of deadlines and such. But anyways, after about six weeks my site started ranking on the first page in ultracompetitive terms such as 'New York Yankees' 'Alex Rodriguez' 'Major League Baseball'... the three weeks hardly seems like being 'sandboxed' or as I would put it, blackballed. It just seems like Google needed time to update, that's all.. You can't expect to submit someting at noon and be first by three..
I smell something here.... ducks ... geese..... horses... no bullshi++. LOL I only poke my my head in now and again to see the "world is flat" "Gravity does not exist" and there is no sandbox threads LOL If you rank on G after 6 weeks for a COMPETITIVE phrase then you are unique.
Is a 1m results with quotes phrase that COMPETITIVE, would you say ? I'm sure it will be possible though, if you add lots of unique content daily and build lots and lots of backlinks ?
I searched new york yankies. Maybe my G is different as I am in Europe, but there was 12 no week old site in the top 10. They were all the Global Fox owned websites. What I suspect is that the search term was not New York Yankies but had AT LEAST two other keywords, and I bet a dollar there was no adwords against these keywords.
It's not the number of results that makes a keyword competitive. What makes a keyword competive is the number of sites that are competiting for it.
And how do you find that out ? Not by using quotes ? I wasn't refering specifically to that phrase - I was just wondering how many 'competing sites' for a certain keyword is too many, so you don't have to wait 1 year to get out of the sandbox for a specific keyword (i.e. one that has 1m results returned when searched for with quotes). I'm just wondering, never knew this for sure. For example, I've had no problems ranking on the first page in about 3 weeks for a keyword with 40k results (with quotes) but now, I have started a website on a phrase which has 1.2m results. After a week it showed up on the 4th page for 2-3 days after which it completely vanished, so I assume it's sandboxed . I'm building a lot of quality links and adding new content every day to the website and SEO it as much as I can - I'm just trying to figure out a timeframe until my keyword will be ranked well (1st or 2nd) page and I gave the above example. I know it also depends on the quality of the other sites but in this case all apart from the first 8-9 are poor quality, don't have much content or backlinks and are not optimized, so I thought I would stand a chance. I've heard time frames from 1 week to 6 months , still not sure. Oh, and the website is the Hannah Montana one in my sig; I also think you can guess my key phrase.
IMHO fella, which, isn't always correct and sometimes harsh, I would leave the site until 2009. If you search hanna montanna (who the hell is she anyway? Scarfaces sister?) there are NO adwords competing thus this is an easy phrase. Trouble is that domain name of yours is regsitered as a Xmas 2007 present thus you either need to be a genius to get it up there....... or just wait. Personally I would look at trying to by a simlar domain name diretly from the owner that is at least 14 months old. Most of these geniuses who can rank for any term in 90 days forget to tell you their domain has been indexed for 5 years with some content!
Right, thank you for your reply, it really helped! Well, I went on and did some research for other websites that rank high for that "Hannah Montana" phrase and which are recently new. For example, http://whois.domaintools.com/hannahmontanaefan.com is on the 3rd page and was registered end of October. The site also sucks... So this should be enough proof for myself that I can rank for that keyword high in about 1-2 months as my site is way better optimized, more content, and soon to be more backlinks as well.
Have a spare domain as well. That way if the site gets killed through too much juice you can start again!
Hey by the way, you know you said about buying an older domain to gain that extra credit and boost frm Google. That's not still valid now that they've reset the expired and used domains counter. For example: http://www.seobuzzbox.com/google-resets-expired-domains/ - they say if you change the site theme too much or structure, etc. your domain will be treated like a new one by Google. I believe this is what they are trying to achieve at least.