10
May 06
May 06
by Andy Hagans Research with 8 Comments
So I have a new (quality) page up on a semi-sandboxed site. The page is optimized for purple widgets. As the resident link monkey, I made sure that no less than 10 out of the top 100 ranking pages (for purple widgets, on G) linked to us.
Predictably, the page isn’t currently ranking in the top 100 on a search for purple widgets. I do expect it to pop out, as, like I said, the site is only semi-sandboxed, and this particular page has all of those legit, relevant, themed links.
But here’s the kicker: the page ranks #11 now on a search for just purple! LBB readers… wtf? You got any explanation? (Before you say "OOP", please note that I wasn’t so stupid as to only use purple widgets as the anchor text — we got a lot of variation, including the odd "click here" and "Site.com" and whatnot.)
Results 1 – 100 of about 701,000 for purple widgets
Results 1 – 100 of about 2,560,000 for purple
Finally, note that neither purple widgets nor purple are competitive or "money" terms — but widgets in general is an extremely competitive affiliate space.
A little help please? 
8 comments - add your's now
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They might have different query types based on the number of words in the query and how commercial the query is.
It might also take time for those links to fully count.
> It might also take time for those links to fully count.
Then why would it still rank for ‘purple’ ?
I got couple sites with same problem, they are all new sites, maybe that is problem
. As times goes i slowly coming up.
Maybe those sites linking to you are ranked higher for the word “purple”. Those sites may also be in DMOZ under “purple” and not “purple widgets”.
I’d put it down to conceptual matching and clusters. Theoretically when you make two different queries they aren’t going to the same indexes, one might be more up to date than the other.
http://www.uwtv.org/programs/displayevent.asp?rid=168
From 30:00 onwards is worth watching.
Who knows, but some guesses: Could be that the answer is buried in a combination of:
- the specifics of the pages being linked from,
- the anchor text on those pages and how it relates to those pages, and,
- the patterns of the link text across the full set of links, such that the OOP filters don’t mind how “purple” is being handled, but don’t like much how “purple widgets” is being handled.
Whether it’s more authority based or kw/anchor text based may be hard or impossible to tell.
I guess it’s possible that onpage factors are involved too, since IMO, they sorta co-exist with the other stuff in terms of how analyzed at G. But more likely, it’s the links. My 2 cents.
How interesting, I have exactly the same problem!
My dutch site about backup used to be the first result on google.nl when searching for ‘backup’, but now it is nowhere to be found in the search results…
But when searching for ‘back-up’ it is on the number one position!
http://www.google.nl/search?hl=nl&q=back-up&btnG=Google+zoeken&meta=lr%3Dlang_nl
Someone told me that this might be related to the fact that the Google servers seem to be ‘full’:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/04/google_bigdaddy_chaos/
From my experience, sandboxing seems to be selective (even for the same site), and it is much much more pronounced for commercially valuable words and phrases.
As you say, “purple” is no “money” term, so Google really doesn’t care about hindering your rankings (if the site is otherwise well-optimized). But it will be tough on you when it comes to business-wise “exciting” terms. That’s where real sandboxing kicks in.
This means practically every new site is only semi-sandboxed because with good optimization it will shortly turn up in SERPs for a lot of less competitive, less monetized queries.