SEO tips = better search engine ranking

Google's sandbox effect

I recently wrote about how a site of mine was getting very bad Google rankings despite strong results for allinanchor searches. A helpful reader told me about Google's sandbox effect. When a new site comes along Google gives it a temporary boost in search engine rankings. Then the sandbox effect kicks in. For about three months after losing the new site bonus, the site is buried in the rankings. The only thing to do is continue adding links and content for when Google lets your site out of the sandbox. Other search engines don't seem to have a sandbox...

While this seems to be part of Google's algorithm, it seems to effect different sites differently. As I already wrote www.travel-plan-idea.com is #1 for allinanchor:travel idea but not in the top 100 for a regular Google search. On the other hand, www.stock-market-idea.com is #1 for allinanchor:stock market idea and #19 in a regular Google search. The main difference is that the travel site has a number of links from external sites while the stock market site has very few links from external sites.

That SEO chat article I linked to at the beginning of this post mentioned that maybe the sandbox effect is based on incoming links; maybe incoming links become less important for a while. This would help explain why my travel site is getting hit harder than my stock market site. My stock market site relies mostly on internal linking for anchor text so external links counting less don't have such a big impact. My travel site has fewer internal links than links from external sites, so external links counting less has a greater effect.

Now this is just conjecture. It could be the comptetiveness of the keywords or something else...