Shoe what would you call or how would you describe the effect affectionately known as the sandbox? I have a PR6 site with good keywork density SE friendly design + URLs and a heck of a lot of backlinks with quite a few from related sites. Yet I rank on page 6 for my search term while PR4s and 0s are on page 1. My site is 2 months old.
Ahh OK.. I just ask because I believe that if this site reaches just page 1 or... *gasp* the #1 spot I'd finally be at the monthly revenue I'd be comfortable with quitting my day job at. It's frustrating being so close note: Not saying I'd quit that day, just that would just be the amount I would need to at in order to quit. I still plan to continue working my job until I've been earning that amount for at least a year from the day it started. Got a family to consider and all. In other words, it's kinda important to me
since my thread hasn't been very clear ( since I had 0 replies on it ) , maybe the question formulated here is better. (sorry to revive an old thread , but I really need an answer ). Numbers ... I want numbers
For one keyword, I'm ranked third for allinanchor, but I don't even appear on the SERPS. At least in the first 30 pages I checked. The search for one month isn't even that much, 5,000 searches per month. It really sucks, too. I built the site based on traffic from search engines, and I can't even rank.
It's likely that something just isn't adding up in G's eyes. They're not yet seeing your site as trusted enough to put at #1 or on page one for that matter. What data are they seeing in these areas: 1. Original Content? 2. Inbound links from: relevant sites on non-directory style pages?, blogs?, pages or sites that rank highly for your keywords and closely related ones?, untrusted/spam sites making up the bulk of your links?, sites you control or have direct influence making up the bulk of your links? 3. User behavior: are search referral visitors staying on pages or digging deeper, or are they hitting back frequently/quickly? 4. Commercial/Info ratio of your site: is your site thin on content with lots of commercial objects (adsense code, affiliate code, sitewide outboudn links, contextual/text ads of any type, etc)? 5. Average age of competing sites that rank top 10. That's just a few of the things I would think about. Others include outbound link quality/bloom/rate, canonicalization issues, etc.
1. It's all written by me. 2. This may be what's putting my site in the sandbox. Out of 800 backlinks, I'd say 10% are from blog posts or links from blogs, 5% from digg or social bookmarking, and 85% from directory/article submissions. I can't really do much in link development until the next Google update since nobody wants to trade with a PR0. 3. Most users will usually look in a category and hit another article before leaving. 4. The content outweighs the ads 10-to-1. 5. Most are at least two years old. I guess I see my faults in backlinks.
Be careful in the rate you build backlinks. It's not an absolute, but often time, new sites that have a quick link bloom that then plateaus (more or less no new links from X point on) do not receive or sustain high rankings for very long. And really, why would they? Ranking a new site based on a surge of links would more often than not lead to ranking crap highly. Ranking sites that got a surge of links but have relatively little other links besides those arrising from the surge-period are either likely spam or one-hit wonders. Either way, again to an algorithm, it's safer to not rank sites with this type of link evolution.
Also, personally, I'd shy away from overdoing it with blog "comment" links. Take all the blog "post" links you can get! Lastly, the social sites, IMO, are most useful in getting your site the attention of bloggers and other webmasters who will then (hopefully) link to your site. Links from these social networking sites themselves probably don't do much. Think of it as someone who knows a ton of people telling everyone they know about your store... and none of those people decide to tell anyone(link to you)... even if they visit your store(as in if the social/digg site *did* send you traffic). That's kinda saying something, isn't it?