Hi. I'm really new to this and would appreciate any advice. I have launched a good quality website 2 weeks ago, and while Yahoo already shows 7 backlinks to it (one of them being Yahoo Directory on which I decided to splurge), Google hasn't indexed it yet at all...! Am I sandboxed? Am I doing something wrong? Is there anything I could do to get finally indexed by Google? Thank you!
An excellent way to get a new website indexed by Google is to post a highly optimized ad on an HTML-enabled classified website such as Craigslist. You write a highly search-engine-optimized ad and embed a link to your website, using carefully chosen anchor text. This works incredibly well. Please check out my guide on how to use Craigslist in search engine optimization. Let me know if you find it useful. 2 weeks isn't that long and I wouldn't worry. But with this technique you can speed things up considerably. Good luck!
It will be hard to make guesses until we see a URL from you. You can get links from social media sites / high PR regularly indexed blogs or forums and within no time your website should be indexed in google.
A good way to check is doing a site:yoururl on google. If subpages show up, but not your main (which got links sent there in the first place), then you're probably sitting in it. For example, the randomzoo link in my sig is probably still sitting there a bit longer before I build up new links to it - you can check yourself doing site:randomzoo.com If you only have 7 backlinks then it's doubtful you have anything to worry about unless they were all from high ranking pages
The best way of getting your website indexed is to get links - from forums like this one, from social bookmarking sites like digg mixx propeller oyax etc, from blog comments (relevant are best for serps) - these all tend to show up in the backlinks pretty quickly. Once your site is indexed, then you may or may not have to contend with a sandbox / new website filter effect.
Just keep on building your site up and you will see it rise. People who get sand-boxed are the ones who build to quickly. Google is trying to weed out the sites that are not legitimately gaining rank. This is ultimately a good thing for you.
Are you using Google webmaster tools? Thats a good start to find out what google see's from your site and what you can do to optimize better. Definitely go look in the google forum at the top of th indix page, plenty of great suggestions.
dont worry, it will turn it, I created a new site on 4 March 09 now its #2 for the keyword term out of 1,600,000 results, just build links slowly, write 1 article per month, post in craigslist & gumtree or any other high PR classified ad sites, look for blog commenting using comment luv, this allows you to put your anchor text were normally you put your name. And soon you will see the site rise in the SERPs. So you have a sitemap? If not get 1 and submit to Google webmaster tools, then create an RSS feed for the site and submit that to pingler dot com That should be enough to get your site up and running, if not add a word press blog to your domain then add content to it almost every 2 days - you will see in webmaster tools how ofter it gets crawled!