SERPs tips?

I've followed pretty much all the information I can find that seems reliable and honest, but I'm still not ranking very well.

the site is www.ffshrine.org . the target keyword/phrase is "final fantasy."

the number 1 position has 84 backlinks. we have 197. our keyword densities are roughly the same- but ours is a little higher. both pages have a pagerank of 5. we both have listings in dmoz.

we're on the fourth page, and they're the #1 result.

any other things it looks like I'm blatantly missing would really be appreciated.

 

How new is your site and the links to it? If you are news within the last three months you may be suffering from the sandbox phenomenon.

People now believe that Google does not apply the full value of backlink until approximately 3 months.

There is a fairly extensive discussion of this that start on the page forty of this thread.

 

the site itself is almost five years old (wasn't always mine), however the domain's changed a few times. it's been ffshrine.org for more than 5 full months however.

 

Does the sandbox phenomenon strike 3 more months for new pages within a site? Do you think changing a page name would trigger 3 more months?

I think I heard that it could apply when the registrant of the domain changes?

 

oh, another interesting thing.

even though I've been in google's index for more than 3 months, adding the " -jfioelx -jfioelx -jfioelx -jfioelx -jfioelx" to the search DOES improve my rankings, and improves them pretty significantly- I'd be on the first page.

still, though, 9 others rank higher than me- despite the fact that I have far more backlinks, usually more pages on the site total, and almost always higher/even keyword density.

 

How did you check the backlinks?

Google shows only PR 4+ links.
Your competitor might have hundreds of links from lower PR sites.

 

Actually if you go and use McDars tool you will see that for allinanchor you are only 17! all the others are in order.

In my opinion you will not get higher than that until that is addressed as well as allintext and allinurl - use Mcdars other tool to view those.

So I would say that you are not being sandboxed you just need to get all the factors sorted

 

If you read the link I posted above to the other thread you'll see we are working on the theory that it is the links that get sandboxed not the page or site. So I don't think the sandbox phenomenon would apply to any of the scenarios you mention.

If you think about it it makes some sense. If Google give full value to a link as soon as it appears, someone could go buy 1,000 links -- really quiet easy to do -- and get immediately vaulted into a high SERP placement. Then if they took them all down in a few weeks or a month, Google would have to drop the site. This would result in a whole bunch of instability in the SERPs.

By delaying the full value of the link Google applies a dampening factor and makes sure the site owner is serious about the semi long term promotion of the site.

 

this really lost me, could you explain?

 

Search engines identify websites by their domains. Thus, in their eyes your site is 5 months old and no more.

 

I'd focus on getting more backlinks. Sometimes, with quality backlinks, you'll get more traffic than Google. I have one backlink that brings in 18% of my traffic, and Google is only about 8%(I'm not placing too great in SERPs yet for that site).

For your site specifically, go to this page:

http://www.nesfiles.com/NES/Final_Fantasy/Final_Fantasy.asp

Click on "Suggest a link", and enter your site info. If you include a reciprical link, I guarantee you'll have a backlink within 6 hours of submittal. Thanks.

 

Ah....sorry about that

McDars tools are:

http://www.mcdar.net/KeywordTool/keywordtool.asp

where you can compare your site to others for a specific KW phrase but it picks out allinanchor as being important [and is the basis of how we started the test that Compar talks about with the link above in his post]

http://www.mcdar.net/dance/index.php

where you can see all the datacenters for google - the default is for the DCs that you "normally see" but to the right you will see "allin_" if you click on that it will give you 4 columns - the first is the "normal"dc - the second is allintext - the next allinanchor and the last allinurl. You can choose how many results you want to see.

Valuable tools that supplement Shawns wonderful KWT here

 

we've got more or less everything sorted out now- the title, the anchor text, the inbound links.

all are fine. we have more backlinks than most of our competitors. but we still place on the third page why they place #1 (or any place between there and our spot).

we have more inbound links than them, the onsite optimization is set, what's left out?