How can you tell if your site is sandboxed, or penalized for keyword saturation? My site is about two months old and when I used the sandbox tool it came up #1-3 for all the terms I was looking to get, however I noticed that every page has a 0 page rank. My site has about 1500 pages and I remember reading that all the interlinking should at least give it a 1 or 2, however I wanted to see if anyone else here knew if there was a way to find out if your site was penalized or not. Ian
You have to wait for the next PR update to see green in the toolbar. If it is 2 months old, more then likely you'll have to face the sandbox and wait it out until your links mature and are stable on good, relevant sites.
That's what I figured. It's amazing that when you have a new e-commerce site that you have to incur a penalty for being new. I'm assuming that the likely reason is so that you have to pay for advertising if you want to get the site going immediately. Otherwise you have to more or less wait out this period. I've also submitted my feed to froogle, and I find it odd that some of my terms come up when they're searched for and some not at all. I understand that to come up in the "best match" category you really need to optimize the landing page and the listing perfectly to hit it. However I thought that when you sort them by price the items would at least appear there, but I have some keywords where the items don't even appear at all. It's very odd. Anyone else run into this? Ian
Also, when I type in link:www.website.com, shouldn't it at least show what backlinks I have? Or are those also unavailable during the sandbox period? Ian
For the most part yes. There are others ways of driving traffic to a site without PPC and search engines, without spending too much, like on a PPC campaign. Give the feed a couple weeks to get fully integrated into Google. Regardless of sandbox, Google will show your backlinks, but you have to keep in mind that Google shows a VERY small sampling of your actual backlinks. They are excellent at indexing pages, so don't worry about Google not finding your links...they know they're there ...they just don't want to show you!
I think one of the reasons to have a sandbox is to keep spammers from setting up "love 'em and leave 'em" domains that they only use for 2-6 months and put no effort into building them into truly useful sites. The real problem is that it's not really recognizing the sites where people really are working hard to build a useful site. As soon as everyone finds out how Google determines a site is useful, it will be used by scammers and spammers. A better way of determining who is linking to you is to use Yahoo! or MSN for checking backlinks.