I have never had a problem with the so called 'sandbox', I am starting to wonder if I am just really lucky, or if it is real at all. I know people say that Google has mentioned it in the past, yet I have never seen anything official from them. Here is an example that I just talked about on Subnixus.com "...you don’t have to wait 4 years to get a good page rank, you just have to wait until the next Google update. Take one of my other sites as an example: Outside the Cube. The domain was registered on Sept. 8th of this year and the site went live on Sept. 15th. After less than a month I was looking at another page rank of 5. So how did I do it? Content + SEO." My basic point is that I registered a new domain, made a site, was indexed in a week with good results and was given a PR5 within a month of launching. If there really is a sandbox, it sure doesn't ever touch me... with any site.
The sandbox doesn't have anything to do with PR or indexing. It's about not being able to place well in the serps for competitive terms.
Sandbox is real. It has to do with searching for keywords. Try searching for your main keyword on Google. Does it come up anywhere?
BUT. The site in the example is just a personal blog. I don't target any hardcore keywords like "camera" or anything. It's mainly the site I use to test SEO tricks.
Okay, I see what you guys are saying. I wouldn't have noticed sites not showing up for really competitive terms because I never really checked right after certain sites were launched... mainly because I just used adwords to drive traffic from day one for terms like "dish network".
If you could get on page 1 in G (not using AdWords) in less than month for "dish network" that would be a prime example of beating the sandbox
Here are a few of the keyword phrases I used, and where they rank right now: Keyword: "live together die alone" - Position 5 (brings in around 1000 hits on wednesday evenings when LOST airs on ABC) Keyword: "Lost Television" - Position 9 Keyword: "karma police" - Position 189 Keyword: "Albert Marx" - Position 1 Keyword: "Million Dollar Idea" - Position 7 (on msn and google until a few days ago when it totally disappeared from google)
Those are actually pretty easy. Albert Marx for example - there are only 188 people using that in the title of a page. "Lost Television" is about 9,500 pages but I wouldn't call that very competitive either. Just take a look at the allintitle and allinanchor results for those phrases and then try some competitive phrases to get an idea of the difference betwen them. "Dish network", for example, has over 2 million competing pages Still not bad though. Good start for a new site. Ranking for something is better than ranking for nothing
I learn something new on this forum everyday... Like I said, I always thought the sandbox effected all keywords, not just competitive words.
You just mentioned that million dollar Idea has totally disappeared a couple of days ao. well you have been sandboxed my friend