Hi I am really starting to dispair at google. I am trying to optimise a website to rank on a few competitive search terms. Now it the same old story, rank brilliant on MSN and Yahoo. Nowhere to be seen on google. Usually I would advise people to build good generic link back in a natural pattern and so on. However I have been doing this from begining and for the last 4 months the set of link I have are quite impressive. Like from monty fool, the sun newpaper, BBC. I have published multiple articles , paid for entry in loads of directories. I have used multiple different anchor text, the links are from tons of different IP address, they are across blog, forum, in the middle of articles. I have used a lot of anchor text with 'click here' and other natural links. I have a good number fo the links spread across the entire site. About two month ago I even started to study competitors sites and do a three way linking campaign to imitate their links. But what every I do the ranking just keeps getting worse. I have more and better links than a lot of the sites that are in the first few places. Yet I m not in the first 100 for any of the keyphrases! I am doing something wrong here and I can't figure it out. Something must flag my site up as spammy and it has been sandboxes indefinately (8 months and counting). Now the onpage optimisation is average not great but it definately deserves a place in the top 100. The only link that I cannot seem to get is DMOZ but I can't believe that could be the different between first page and no where. I'm now open to any suggestions. Even Vodoo magic. Thanks in advance Nixies.
While you are in the sandbox or aging delay or whatever Google will still rank you for LOW competitve keywords that are in your <title>. So if you do some research and find a good keyword throw it in there and give it a try. But if its a competitive keyword then it wont happen. Discaimer: This information is based on 2 new sites that I have launched and tested on. May not work for your site.