Hello, My site has like 7 months now and everybody here told me to be patient because in the first year Google will not see my site with good eyes and this might be a possible cause for the low traffic. I have now like 400-450 visitors / day. I brought new links, ..., but my traffic is still low. Here is a very strange situation. I wrote some good reviews for several products on my site. Unique content and all that stuff. During the first week I was in the first page in SERPS, now I disappeared for good. I checked and the review pages are NOT in supplemental index. What's wrong? is this because my site is too young to be taken seriously by Google? I mean, at least I want to know if there is a problem on my side or this is just the Google way ... BTW, I checked all 53 pages in SERPS , all of them ...
if your site is indexed you are not banned and if you are getting visitors from google then you are not sandboxed. and i have sites witch start to rank well in the SERPS within 28 days in a competitive market so all what you need to do is keep on optimizing and get more quality backlinks to your website with your keywords in the anchor text then you will be fine.
And how do you explain the fact that my review pages ranked very well for 1-2 weeks and now they are gone from SERPS ?
That's not completely correct. If you are sandboxed you still get visitors from google but not as much as non-sandboxed sites
This is my opinion too. Sometimes when the site is sandboxed, you can receive visitors from Google but for very strange keywords.
I know Google algorithms are not public but many people here have great experience with Google and I thought the facts I presented can be known by you. Your opinions help me.
They're new. Any new content seems to rank very high for its first week or two, and then dives - and slowly rises again. SEO takes time - a long time. Be patient.
If I have a new site, (i.e. something less than 3 months old), how do I combat the Sandbox effect? People always say Domain Age is a factor for SEO. If I can get some high PR sites (pages) linked to my site and lift up my PR, will it offset the Sandbox effect? Which factor has more weight while calculating SERP?
You have to stay in sandbox for a while, I don't think there is a way to completely escpae it. Quality content and backlinks will help you get out of sandbox sooner. you question should be which factors have more weight... for google, i would say unique content and quality backlinks , especially nature links
I did a search fro just my domain name like [mydomain.com] and saw that my site was the very last result. That is a good sign you're penalized. Luckily for me, it came out a week later. You may want to not buy ads and comply with TOS