Hi All, Its my first post please be gentle I have a domain registered December 04 first crawled end of that month, now visited be Googlebot on a daily basis. There are now 1800 IBL's to the domain with varied anchor text, more so for a pacific KW phrase Im targeting. 80% of the IBL's are from very on topic sites, 500 of those are reciprocal. None of which have been banned/penalty (the bad neighbourhood thing) The main KW phrase is sprinkled in the <body> that reads well and is not spammy. The phrase is also in the Title and header. This is the way the top 2 sites for that KW phrase have their page layout. Now my loss of sleep and complete frustration is getting this to rank high. It is no1 MSN, 3 In Y but 170 In Google of about 1,250,000 results (not that competitive). I have a gut feeling that the domain has been through the age delay filter (sandbox) as It was sitting at 400 something for 5 months. So the question Is, does this still look like to you a matter of waiting it out to see if it is still filtered or add more back links with that KW as the anchor but risk a penalty for over doing it. Very difficult to answer I know but maybe someone has had a similar experience waiting 8 months + to rank well In G. Thanks
December 04 is not very old at all. In the current algorithm my experience is that domain age is the MOST important factor.. I would say just continue your link building in the same manner as what you are currently doing. The Google rankings will happen eventually, and there isn't much which can be done to force them to occur earlier.
Eight months is no time at all. There is also a theory that the effect of individual backlinks is time delayed. So assuming that you gained your backlinks over time and not in the first week of your website going live there may be a good percentage of your backlinks still to take full effect. All in all I wouldn't worry unduly at this early stage just keep building the links. Mick