In google for my primary keyword I come in at 154 out of 1,450,000 results. Now my site is only about 10 months old, I have worked on it extensively to help me insure a decent supply of targeted traffic to my site. I rank # 1 in Yahoo and Msn, for many, many keywords including primary ones. But Google Adwords is where I get most of my traffic. And I pay a pretty penny for it. I will always use the ppc's even when I get higher natural rankings, I just feel that if the people see us in the sponsor and natural rankings it lends even more credibility. Anyway, do you feel that a ranking of 154 puts me out of the sandbox, and if it does, does anything standout to you that would help me out? Ie, design, keyword density, links, whatever helps. Thank you for your help in advance.
154 = not out yet.. I don't think a local carpet cleaning keyphrase will be so demanding that you're still in the mid 100's and not penalized for being a new site. Good luck! btw... an H1 tag wouldn't hurt.
You will still need to be in the top 10 or 20 to be considered to be out of the sandbox. But out of over a million sites that isn't bad. I think you should just keep doing what you're doing and eventually you will get in the top ten or twenty.
I ran SEOElite's backlink analyzer on your site and I am betting that Google is just filtering out a large portion of your links. Most of them appear to be from this linkbuilding program: http://www.linkbuildingdirect.com/. My guess is that you are ranking #1 on the other 2 engines because they haven't done anything to filter those out - Google probably has, which seems fairly easy (I noticed the program myself pretty easily just because all your links were from pages with exactly 16 outbound links and they all have similar URL's. That's probably fairly easy to identify). So my guess is that you are not in the sandbox - you just aren't getting credit for all your links in Google.
Hmm hard to say, that's not that bad of a ranking technically considering how many results there are. Obviously you won't get any traffic there though. When my site was in the sandbox is took over 1 year to be released. I was never in the top 1000. Next update about a year later I ranked #2, go figure. Best bet is to not worry about and keep doing your thing with SEO. Over time you'll be where you want if you work on it!
Here's at least another indication I have noticed that it is a link-counting issue: do an allinanchor: search for your keywords. allinanchor:carpet cleaning arizona brings you up on the third page in Google, but you rank first on Yahoo for it. That's a pretty big difference and I wouldn't expect it if the engines were counting your links in the same way. I see a couple of links that have the words arizona and carpet cleaning in them that aren't from that program, but they are forum links (like the one in your sig) and probably aren't worth that much, but they might be enough to get it that allinanchor. My suggestion: you need to revamp the way you're linking if you want in Google. Try the coop, try reciprocals, try articles, but don't use something that is going to be so easy for Google to identify and get rid of.
Google is all about relevant links from authority sites. Forum links and to a lesser degree, directory links, do not carry near the weight as a link from sites in the same or related sector. If you exclude links from your own site, forum links, and non-relevant sector links, you have very few links that show as backlinks from google (google doesn't so all, but it's still a gauge). MSN will take any link. Yahoo is a bit more selective. Both have a higher tolerance for SEO practices such as keyword density. Ranking well with MSN and Yahoo can sometimes mean your site is trying too hard in the eyes of google. I would forget about link programs and short cuts, try to develop quality links. They take the most time, which is why it is so hard for many to rank well with google.