I run an estate agency website. Got a PR4, Google sitemap, hundreds of backlinks. the site has been running well over a year. First place on MSN, hotbot, Lycos, etc for relvant keywords. However can't get onto the first 3 Pages at all on google. In fact, Ive just given up on Google. Very frustrating. Can't even be bothered to find out why.
For competitive terms it will probably last longer. But hundreds of backlinks over a year is actually pretty poor you should be able to build a lot more than that over a month.
nobody can give exact times . that depents on * your site category and related keywords * your page rank and backlinks
It depends on the sort of links you get. One of my sites is 18 months old and still sandboxed but another ranks 10th for a very competitive term (single word query, 50 million results) after just 2 weeks. This site went viral and got the right links from the start.
Yes it depends. If you're after very competitive keywords google will be more cautious with your site.
I have a blog that recently came out of the sand box. It took almost 6 months to the day. Seriously. One way you know you are in the sandbox is that all the sites linking to you will rank above you for the keywords you are shooting for. Then one day you will pop to the top for that particular keyword phrase.
Oh, one other thing. I have gotten no backlinks for that site for about three months. I decided with this site I would just put out 5 or 6 really good posts at the begining and then I got about 20 or 30 backlinks. Then I just let it mellow for about three or four months. During those months I was behind every site that linked to me with the diffrent keyword phrases I was playing with. Then on almost 6 months to the day I popped to SERP 2.
Before I moved to a new domain, my blogspot blog was sandboxed for 3 months. Obviously you still get ranked for non-competitive keywords.
New to the forum, sorry for the stupid question : What's this sandbox thing? How can I tell if my site is in it?
Its when you have thousands of links but because your site is less than a year or 2 old you still don't rank for any competitive search terms.
There's no definite way of finding out how long sites remain in the sandbox. Just keep doing what you're doing and eventually, you'll see the traffic pour in.
I guess I'm the only one who hasn't been sandboxed? You need to get quality backlinks and you'll be out asap.
There could be many reasons why you weren't sandboxed depending on your niche and domain age. Otherwise most of the new sites are affected by sandbox but the duration could vary again depending on niche and other factors...
How long you stay in the sandbox depends on how competitive your target keywords are. One of my sites was in the sandbox for 9 months, and another was in for a year. The website that was in for a year targets a must more competitive search term.
Would you say getting quality backlinks is the #1 priority before you start adding more content, or would you say both at the same time? The reason I ask is because it seems like getting backlinks will cost money (which I don't have) and adding more content only takes time (which I DO have).
If you add content then the backlinks come for free. I wrote an article last week that already has 2,500 people linking to it including some huge sites. It didn't cost me a penny.
Doesn't the "sandbox" just mean that Google will not attribute trust to your domain from backlinks until x amount of time passes or y amount of trust is built up through backlinks?