Am I leaving the sandbox?

[wolseley]

I've had a site running since October for which I have been targetting a very competative keyphrase (amongst others). Up until a few days ago, my site was nowhere to be seen in google for this term, although it ranks OK in Yahoo and MSN and also quite well for the allinanchor: search.

A couple of days ago I noticed (quite by chance as I was checking something else at the time) that it was showing up at about 630th for this phrase in a handful of the datacenters. Today it is at about 590 and in many more centers.

I know that the current ongoing google update is complicating things, but I was wondering if anyone has had any previous experiences which may suggest that this site is beginning to emerge from the sandbox (if there really is one - and I don't want to start that debate).

Any comments, opinions and insights are more than welcome.

Thanks.

[I, Brian]

The Google Sandbox is pretty much a term used to describe the delay of anchor text targeting in links by volume, and by volume I mean in the thousands, tends of thousands, hundreds of thousands of links.

If you practice links by volume, then rankings in the hundreds are effectively signs of sandboxing - rankings in the 500's sounds like background noise, rather than anything to cheer about.

If you're targeting keywords in proper volume, then you'll know you're out of the sandbox, because the targeted pages will cease to rank in the Top 500 and instead within the Top 20.