Newbie question about Sandbox

[mc4210]

Hello all,

I've been doing quite a lot of reading on SE forums in general but I still can't seem to find an answer to my question.

I registered a brand new domain in December and built a site with about 200 pages on it (finished in February) and targeted some relatively competitive, but not thaaaat competitive keywords (e.g. no.3 result on google is a site with 300 pages, which i'll use as a reference).

I've also been writting and submitting articles, and after submitting about 6-7 of them, MSN shows a link count of about 800 for my site, while my number 3 comperitor has a staggering count of 17,000 links. My site is a PR3 and my competitor is a PR4. I've also used a keyword density analyzer tool and I've noticed that most of my pages have higher keyword density than my competitor's. Also, my competitor's anchor text does only contains these keywords in about 1% of the links (according to SEOElite)

So, how is it that for two sites of approximately the same size and with only a small difference in PR, one site is no.3 result and the other (with a higher keyword density) is nowhere to be seen? Can this be what is called the Sandbox effect?

I've read that Google claims Sandbox does not exist, so could it perhaps be something else? Also, a friend of mine built a site in October and it would show up as no.1 for the keywords she selected (not competitive keywords at all, about 6,000 searches per month) as early as November! And it still had a PR of 0!

That's basically why I'm wondering. Is the Sandbox something that Google decided to implement early in 2006 or something, so sites developed previous to that were not affected?

Well, I'd appreciate any comments on the issue. I'm not really trying to see quick results with no effort, nor do I depend on my site financially (maybe some day...), I'm just experimenting and very eager to learn about search engines and I'd like to know if I'm moving in the right direction or if there's something I'm completely missing!

Thanks in advance!

[BradBristol]

Can this be what is called the Sandbox effect? No.

It is a matter of optimization of your site. Keyword density is ONLY one small part of optimizing your site. There are many many other factors that are more important in determining where your page will rank (google says there are about 100 ranking factors).

...only a small difference in PR... Googles PageRank (named after Larry Page - not where your page ranks in the SERP) is a geometrical progression. In other words a PageRank 2 is 10 times harder to get than a PageRank 1 and a PageRank 3 is 20 times harder to get than a PageRank 2 etc. Note: the numbers I have used are pure speculation used just for examples, but it is a fact that google’s PageRank is a geometrical progression.

Let me ask you a question... If you had this site of yours up and running for several years, you worked hard to make it #1. Then one day some guy spends an afternoon building a site and in one or two days your site that you worked hard on for years and years is replaced by this new comer with no track record or history... how would you feel? Would you think this was ‘fair’?

It takes time and effort (a LOT of both) to make a site successful, putting together a site and making it live even in a few months does not even come close to years and years of constant work.

So my advice is, go back to work... :)

[mc4210]

Thanks for your comments. Good to know that it doesn't have anything to do with the Sandbox :)

I will have to disagree regarding your example of what would be fair or not. My purpose is not to rank no.1 in one afternoon but to go a bit past the "if you build it, they will come" stage of SEO understanding that I find on most sites. I will most certainly go back to experimenting with the site but I'm looking for a better idea of what exactly it is I should work on. I'm actually a software engineer and can't stand the fact that in SEO you can't just reverse engineer the SEs and see exactly what's going on! :mad:

I've read about 3 books on SEO (and I mean real books not 30page e-books on how to be #1 in 24 hours) and they all pretty much say the same things. I've tried to implement everything I've read in these books, but I guess there's a reason why people say real SEOs will never guarantee results... It's the other 90 factors :)

Anyway, thanks again & take care!

[BradBristol]

Sorry I kind of went off on a tangent in that last post of mine.

But I do see a LOT of people that seem to think that if they build a page/site it should go to the #1 spot for their keywords a few minutes after it goes live and we all know that never ever happens in the real world.

Paper Books on SEO - Waste of money and time, in my opinion. By the time those books went to print the SEO world had changed a bunch. SEO moves fast, every day the search engines are changing, the competition is changing. It takes months and months to get a paper book published, the SEO world totally changes in a day or in an hour. So what you are reading in that paper SEO book is really nothing but old SEO History. Also, most of those paper books on SEO were not written by SEO's.

There is at least one ebook on SEO (Aaron Wall's Seobook) that is updated all the time and kept current by the author and is recommended by most people that know the SEO biz.

[mc4210]

Yeah, my first post must've seemed pretty lame!

Oh, and I've read Aaron's book as well :) Along with "The Unfair Advantage" by SearchEngineNews...

Well, I guess trial and error is the way to go.... unless someone comes-up with an open-source search engine ;)