Hey everybody, first time poster here. I have a site, NetworthIQ (http://www.networthiq.com) which ranks #1 on MSN, #18 on Yahoo, but is nowhere on Google for the keywords net+worth (along with the phrase "net worth"). I eliminated a duplicate content problem a couple monts back with www and non www. The site has a healthy Google page count and PageRank and I've tried to optimize for those keywords. Can anyone provide any insight about the discrepency between Google and the others? I appreciate any advice.
Yahoo and MSN are easier to manipulate for ranking because of their heavy focus for on page factors like keyword density, page titles, header tags and so on. Google is harder to rank because their focus is mainly on off the page factors like incoming links and anchored text. I did a very quick analysis and can give you two tips. In your page titles separate the word networthiq in to three words, net worth iq. This way the search engines can read the three words. Get some quality links pointing to your site with the word Net Worth in the anchored text. Hope this helps.
Thanks for the replies. I wondered about the sandbox. It's so hard to tell because the site does come up in other searches occaisonally, and always when searching directly for "networthiq." But, for this particular search, it's not there. I'll try the title change and see if that gets any traction.
The sandbox effect has to do with trust. Getting some quality links helps with getting out of the sandbox.
I have experienced it to some degree and from what I've been reading and learning. I don't want to come across as an seo guru because I am far from it and my opinion is just that, my opinion. With that said, my understanding so far is that the sandbox effect takes effect when a site is young and doesn't have much "trust" because of the incoming links. If a site never builds quality incoming links it will never rank within Google. Well, it's not really the site that will rank but from its pages within the site. Here's an example of one of my expermints. I built a one page site that was fully optimized. The site has only 3 inbound links, one from a popular directory. Within 3-4 weeks the page ranked # 1 on Yahoo and Msn but no where to be found on Google. When I searched the keyphrase in quotes Google brought up the link from the directory but not the actual site. I believe that this happens because the directory has hundreds of inbound links and some of those are high quality links so Google "trusts" the directory and doesn't even recognize the actual site for that keyphrase. Once again, I want to say that I am green when it comes to seo and this point may be arguable. I just wanted to take a moment to answer the question that was posed to me and to share what I've learned when it comes to the sandbox.