My site still in Google sandbox after 8 months!

One of my sites was created and uploaded in June of last year. Since then I've managed to get it to the very top of Yahoo! and MSN/Live for the terms "Diving Thailand" and "Thailand Diving".

It has a PR=3 at the moment and is in the results for terms like "Andaman Coast". But for some reason, Google still isn't showing the site in its result pages for the more important term "Diving Thailand".

I've read that Google may keep a site in its sandbox for up to a year, but I've had sites get in to its search results within a couple of months.

My guess at this point is that the term is too competitive for Google to allow it to jump straight in considering the number of sponsered listings on the side.

Any ideas?

Its sounds like one of two things is happening.

1) Your site has come out of the sandbox and it isnt well optimsied enough to rank well for the terms "Diving Thailand", due to backlinks and on page factors.

2) Your site has started to come out of the sandbox, and will see better rankings, over the next 4 -6 months. Which will include the terms diving thailand.

The way to check this is to do a search for

allinanchor:diving thailand.

If you rank considerabley higher in this search you are still suffering from the 'sandbox effect' for that term in Google.

My gut feeling is that both are in play, you are still suffering from some of sandbox effect, but you still need to progress further with you link building before ranking for this term.

6 months of busy linking building ought to see you rank for this term.

I did the check, it seems to be a bit of both as you said. Thanks, that's a big help! Much appreciated.

Build powerful backlinks and you will have your reward

Sorry I forgot to say that I checked your site for backlinks and found this:

Google 0
Yahoo 59,563
MSN 3127
Teoma 0

So you are not doing very well in Google

Hi!

Try to get some inbound links from the anchor text "Diving Thailand". and cool you will come out of it.

As a note google does not report all backlinks and is usually grossley out of date with the figures it does report, don't worry about the Google backlinks figure at this stage.

What is more worrying is the very high yahoo figure for a site this age, are you part of an automated link scheme, if so I would be cautious about that at this point in sites life.

Whilst coming out of the sandbox you have to be a little more ethical in your linking than an old , aged and trusted site needs to be.

If its not automated and sitewide links, congratulations on gaining so many links so quickly.

Thanks for your input guys, I appreciate it.

I don't use any form of black-hat SEO in my work, including link spamming techniques.

According to the link popularity checker by ARELIS, I have 12 links in Google, 352 links in Yahoo, and 746 links in MSN/Live.

I did an 'allinanchor:thailand diving' check on Google, my site is listed at #19.

My content is well optimzed throughout the site.

I'll just play a waiting game.
Thanks

Can a site have a PR3 and still have 0 back links from google?

google bl count ia as useless as a candle in the wind.

Yes, it can... My site has PR6 and google is not linking to it... ;)

But I bet you mean the link:yoursite.com command, which is totally useless for backlink check. Use "linkdomain:" in yahoo or google webmaster tool.

PS: Shouldn't it be in SEO Faq's? So many people still looking at the link:..., aahh

Use Webmaster Tools to get a more accurate idea of what Google thinks are your backlinks. It only seems to update occasionally, though.