I have my homepage indexed with google, but none of my other 30+ pages. Does this indicate that I am in the sandbox?
It depends on how long your site has been indexed. If all pages have been linked together they will get indexed soon, building a few good links might help. Have you tried this on google "site://www.yoursite.com" with your domain name.
The sandbox has nothing to do with being indexed. The sandbox is domain age related and affects certain highly competitive keywords - during this time in the "sandbox" google will not factor in your backlinks when calculating SERPS. Backlinks will still show, PR will pass, but the will not be used in their algorithm for SERPS.
Ok, thanks. I am in a highly competitive area, so I do expect the sandbox treatment. So far, my site is one month old and I only have the one page indexed by google, and only it shows in the SERP, nothing else. Patience!!!
yeah it depends on how long you've had your site. My site was sandboxed for the first month it was up, which is pretty ordinary, but one day it just became "unsandboxed" which will probably happen to you also
With all the tips on SEO tricks, I believe that interesting content is by far the most important aspect of getting higher Google ratings. I believe what has happened with Google is their ranking system now analyzes content for information, relevance, incisiveness, and lack of sales hype. (How they do that is still a mystery to me.) BUT--this means that the only "trick" that works is really good writing--writing that is clear, to the point and answers quickly the questions prospects have. In other words, web copywriters have to be literate and logical as well as having a lucid writing style. This very high bar has put a lot of SEOs out of business--thank God--as their labors produced some pretty dreary websites.