Ian Mcanerin has noted on his blog a test to see if he can get the website www.mcanerin.us ranking for the term "dotus" at Google (specifically this page). The site was registered on Oct. 24, 2005 and is currently ranking #4 at Google (though not nearly that well at MSN or Yahoo!).
So how did Ian do it?
I'll give the pieces of evidence without making any guesses of my own:
- The page that's ranking - https://www.mcanerin.com/us/dotus.htm is showing in Google as www.mcanerin.us/us/dotus.htm - there's a re-direct (although that may be new).
- The page is only linked to from the sitemap page
- There's almost no off-site links to mcanerin.us at all (see yahoo - I count 3).
- Only one of those links appear to have the actual anchor text "dotus" in it.
- He's not trying to rank for the term on the home page at all - in fact, no mention of dotus or a link to the page.
Let's see if we can solve the mystery in the comments. Time for some Scooby-Doo mystery music.
Rand,
Funny, Ian's test was on my mind too.
I posted my guesses over on my blog yesterday. I'd say it's a combination of the ratio of trusted links, link history, and low competition keyword.
Intresting... I have some ideas of my own now, im off to test them.
If google has a trustlink system, were all shooting ourselves in the foot submitting to countless directories. Concentrating on 5 high quality links would see us rank well? I personally dont see that this is a factor but im setting up a seperate experiment regarding that also.
Keep in mind, if you are testing an anti-sandbox technique, you have to choose a phrase that's competitive enough to be sandboxed, but NOT competitive enough to run into other issues.
For example, you are not going to rank number 1 for "pharmacy" in 29 days, sandbox or no. So setting up a test for that phrase throws in other variables that would make the test invalid. You won't know why you are not showing up.
Choose a term that you can rank on with a non-sandboxed site within the time period alloted, then do the test, otherwise you are just fooling yourself. People who are questioning my choice of that particular phrase are missing that point. It was very carefully choosen. Grab a sandboxed site and try to rank for it in 29 days and you'll see.
Second, one quick way you can tell you've been sandboxed is finding a ranking and then looking immediately under it. If, within a short distance, you start seeing "supplementary" results, then you can be pretty sure that you are only showing up as a "last gasp effort". If there are no supplementary results nearby, then either there are no supplimentary results for that search at all (and the list is really short) or you are not in the sandbox and just need to do better at SEO, IMO.
Ian
Since the lightbulb went off in his head while he was working on his redirect article, we have to assume the redirect plays a large part in it. So, doing a redirect, and keeping the seo very light (few links, no mention on home page) is probably the answer. Of course, being a non-competitive kwd doesn't hurt either.
My opinion is that this is box-dodging, despite the low competitive level. It's certainly harder to box-dodge more competitive terms, but I think that based on the posts we've been seeing from some of the techie SEO types (Webguerilla, Oilman, Mcanerin), there's a cat just waiting to be let out of the bag.
you know, i've been noticing the sandbox has lightened up a bunch after this last update... i'm not sure if there is a discussion about it anywhere, but our company has launched at least 5 sites after this update, and they are all ranking in G .. (for non-competitive terms of course, but this is still better than what i've seen in the past)
I have been fortunate to get brand new sites to score top serp positions in 30 day’s on non-competitive terms. The accompanying pages that use money KWD’s are not found. Only the non-competitive words score high.
D
Uh, I don't see how that is so great. Gee, that keyphrase has 17,000 or so competing pages in Google, what an accomplishment (sarcasm).
I have a site I launched 2 weeks ago and is getting google traffic for bunch of keyphrases, with more than 1 million competing sites in top 10-20.
Doesn't the sandbox only affect competitive terms? A search for dotus using the keyword selector tool at overture returned no suggestions. "dot us," however, had just under 3k searches last month.