New Domain Penalty Or "sandbox" Question!

[rcritchett]

Hey peeps,

I've read a ton about SEOs and site owners experiencing this lag, especially within the last year, before actually ranking well in the engines for semi competitive terms, with great on site optimization and some pretty strong backlinks.

I started reading about it because I have a 2 month old domain, for an actual local business, I've managed in two months to get to page 1 for all of my keywords, but not in the top 3 spots.

Side note: It seems, with local businesses specifically (and certainly with other keywords and business models), that spots 1,2,3 and 4 are the only spots that really matter (generally speaking).

Anyway, after two months, I've reached page 1, but cannot break 6th or 7th position. Am I just being impatient? My backlinks are a ton of local blog commenting, about 10 EZA articles, a lot of bigger blogosphere blog commenting, some strong local directory backlinks and even some really powerful backlinks from profiles on local meetup sites (which is actually meetup.com).

Is there truth to this sandbox effect in the sense that the links you're building have a waiting period before they actually are seen as authoritative, or powerful in Google's eyes?

What are your opinions ?

[razorhound]

Yeah you have to be patient. It takes time to move in SERP. Try to get more backlinks from different sources, maybe a private blog network. I had 2 sites with one keyword each that stuck at position #4 for quite some time and they moved to #1 as soon as I build different links to them.

[rcritchett]

@razorhound - Gotcha. Great to have your example in the mix. Thanks for your response. ! Definitely makes me think about varying my link building processes.

[razorhound]

Originally Posted by rcritchett

@razorhound - Gotcha. Great to have your example in the mix. Thanks for your response. ! Definitely makes me think about varying my link building processes.

Forgot to mention, I tried to vary my anchor text with two additional LSI keywords (another site) and the main keyword moved 2 spots from #4 to #2 in just few days (was stuck there for 4-6 months). It's also easier to rank for the LSI keywords so you might want to give it a try.

[JSProjects]

It always seems like hitting page 1 is the easy part. Trying to climb into the top 3 is what requires the real work. Page 1 is actually pretty good for that short of a timeframe. Especially if it's a moderately competitive term.

Just keep plugging away.

[rcritchett]

@razorhound - Ah, that makes sense. I've heard a lot about that. As if Google is looking at the same anchor text over and over again as "unnatural," which makes sense (theoretically)

@JSProjects - Thanks man. Yea, it didn't seem too difficult to get to where I'm at, and the rest of the climb is seeming harder for sure.

Thanks for the reinforcement. I'll be continuing to plug...

[rcritchett]

Anyone else?

[lovboa]

Originally Posted by rcritchett

Is there truth to this sandbox effect in the sense that the links you're building have a waiting period before they actually are seen as authoritative, or powerful in Google's eyes?

What are your opinions ?

If they were really powerful backlinks, it would move up. Having to wait few weeks or months before the backlinks are recognized as "good" is false.
Usually, the reason is that...although the backlinks were "good"...it just isn't enough to move you up a position on the first page. Especially if your page is only few months old competing with older, more authoratative sites.

[TheFBGuy]

Originally Posted by rcritchett

Is there truth to this sandbox effect in the sense that the links you're building have a waiting period before they actually are seen as authoritative, or powerful in Google's eyes?

Nope, nada, zilch, zero, none. Example: if Yahoo published a NEW article and within the article, they linked to you with your anchor text... your rankings would shoot up almost OVERNIGHT... that would be one super powerful contextual back link from a TRUSTED and AUTHORITY website. So it's about where your links are coming from, and what kind of links they are.

... and of course other factors such as the strength of your competition, but yeah to answer your question... none whatsoever.