My understanding is that the website Walken2008 is a joke and nothing more. However, it has the distinct privilege of being the fastest site I've ever observed coming out of Google's notorious sandbox. Despite being registered only 12 days ago - Aug. 11 according to records, the site is now ranking #3 for the remarkably competitive term - Christopher Walken. Although I don't have the screenshots to prove it, I personally checked the site last week when it came out and noticed it had been boxed - it wasn't ranking in the top 100 for Christopher Walken, and was only page two for "Walken 2008" at Google, while being top 5 across the board at the other SEs and for the allin searches (for both phrase variations). Naturally, a dozen or more sites linking to it were in front. The number of news items on the site probably pushed it out.
Another interesting note is that the Walken site was previously hosted at www.walkenforpres.com, which still shows in the Google results and hasn't been 301'd to the new domain... Very odd indeed.
I think this can be good circumstantial evidence that Google really does live up to their promise of "releasing" sites that are "topical phenomena". I'm, naturally, interested in watching more sites that follow this pattern to see if and for how long they too are boxed. To that end, I'm working on a list of sites to monitor over the next few weeks to watch their performance in the SERPs and how Google handles them. With a little luck, no one from the 'plex will see this post.
Here's my current short list:
- MaverickMums.co.uk - They recently launched, and should gain quite a few links. They're currently not in the top 400 for the title tag "Buy and sell nearly new child & baby things" and even in quotes, they rank considerably behind their own directory listings.
_ - ActionProfiles.com - Which hasn't done a good job of SEO in any sense, but will probably receive a high number of on-topic links regardless thanks to its connections and content. I'm watching them for the phrase "Action Profiles" for which they're currently #1 at MSN and at GG for allinanchor. I don't think they're "boxed" yet, but I suspect they might be soon.
If you have any good ideas to contribute, please post them below and I'll add the to the watchlist.
From observing the filter on so many websites, my experience has been that its effects can be strong, moderate or even quite mild. Nonetheless, its clearly the same phenomenon and same symptoms each time. One does not have to be ranking "miserably" for every single term or phrase to be considered affected by the filter - it's not as black+white as many make it out to be.
I have a site thats really sandboxed ( I think randfish tool says 70%). It's all for non competitive phrases, less than half a millon results and my site isn't there. Its also #1 in msn and yahoo for most terms
In spaces where there is no optimization going on, there's no sandbox to escape. Want to see it in action, try optimizing for a "newsworthy" event that a celebrity does. A well structured post (title, h1, bolds etc), combined with good quality outbounds using "on target" anchor text, mixed in with about 20 or so blog comments that link back to the proper page, from some nice popular well trafficed blogs will do the trick.
Michael, good to see you here!
Note that SEOmoz (which is 'boxed', albeit not strongly) shows up for both randfish & seomoz searches; it's my experience that sandboxed domains can rank for unique terms, of which Maverick Mums certainly is one.
Christopher Walken is simply too badass to be sandboxed. :)