I have a 2 year old website that has never had any SEO work done it before and had only a few low quality backlinks. I have performed a link building campaign for the domain focusing on paid authority links from directories in this website's industry and did some onpage optimization focusing on 3 keyphrases. I have seen a boost on MSN but can't find the site in Google or Yahoo. I have gone into the 600's looking for the domain but just don't see it in there. All Pages are cached and we get crawled bi-weekly by Googlebot... domain is currently a pr 2 and should be a pr 4 for the next update. Competition on the first page for the keywords targeted are pr 0-4 so there is not a lot of established competition there. Just wondering if this domain has been re-sandboxed due to my recent link building campaign?
Once you are out of the sandbox, you do not go back it since it is based on the age of the domain. There are other penalties, but usually people don't have enough quality backlinks from relevant sites. Google is very selective about its backlinks. Look at the top ranking sites for your keyword and see how many backlinks google shows for them.
a comparable site to ours on the first page has 10 backlinks according to Google (I am well aware of google's backlink reporting) and is a pr 4. noteworthy links include a yahoo directory entry and two "adult authority" directories. That's all they have. And the site has roughly 10 pages of content total.
As you mention G's backlink tool is lapse - check in Yahoo for the backlinks then and you'll learn a lot more.
Google always shows the fewest backlinks. They stopped reporting many of them some time ago because people were looking at top ranking sites and trying to duplicate their backlinks - but it's all relative because other sites get the same. It's just not the number of backlinks, but relevant backlinks and authority sites. I read that Matt Cutts picked Yahoo as one of four directories he would submit to. There are also on page factors that can give your site a penalty - generally doing things that make it look like you are trying too hard to rank i.e. keyword density, use of too many h1 tags, etc. Hidden text will also get you a penalty. Just keep building relevant backlinks and eventually you will see an increase.
Thanks for the tips guys... I am well versed in Google's backlink reporting issues. I guess I'll just keep plugging along.
Hi webseoguide, Please let me add the info about Google Sandbox. My website has escaped from Google Sandbox after 2,5 months was in it. If our site is in Google Sandbox, we must do some actions to escape faster. If not, it will take a long - long time to escape. What I did last time to escape: 1. Change my web layout 2. Add web content, at least twice a week 3. Submit articles to article directories 4. Check my back links. If there are some websites banned by Google and they link to our webs, they can cause our webs to be banned too (or to be sandboxed). Delete them. Hope this helps. Good luck ! MES
What is your site category?? When you say "adult authority", I am not sure if you are talking about "adult xxx" type sites, because if your site is adult related then you might as well forget about it because Google recently dumped all of its adult content. If you do a search for any adult related terms then you will not find the hardcore stuff in the top results anymore. Good luck!