I've noted on several occassions that SEOmoz is largely sandboxed at Google. Despite having great, natural link popularity (thanks everyone!), the traffic from Google is on the order of 20-50 people a day, all of whom either typed in 'randfish' or 'seomoz'. Thankfully, at Yahoo! and MSN, the site ranks spectacularly for a great variety of searches (but, it seems that web-dev types don't use those engines much).
Today, however, I was shocked to see 50+ visitors from Google for a single phrase - search ranking factors. It appears as though the recent article is #1 in Google's SERPs. Naturally, I was very excited, and immediately began checking my other unique articles that received a large number of links:
- SEO Quiz
- 2005 Google Sandbox Analysis
- Interview with Dr Garcia
- Black Hat vs White Hat Search Spam Debate
- Interview with MSN Web Search Team
Nope. Not ranked anywhere for anything on any of those. On each, I see 20-30 pages ranking first that all link to the document in question, so we can safely assume that the site is still boxed, but Google let out that one page...
This is the first time I've ever observed a phenomenon like this in regards to the sandbox. At this point, I'm guessing that Google may actually pull the rest of the site out in the next few days. If so, we've found a cure for sandboxing - lots and lots and lots of legitimate link love. The article has 450+ links according to Yahoo! and my tracking software shows visitors from nearly 1000 unique referring pages.
In the meantime, if there are any Google engineers reading this site, let me beg you not to treat SEOmoz special. I have no problems remaining "boxed" indefinitely and definitely don't want to be manually bailed out. I'm conducting research here, people ;)
Its now actually #8 for "search engine ranking factors" with the engine in there... Just took an extra day or two. IMO this is mostly a ton of really great quality links, with great anchor text and then to a much lesser degree also great on-page content/optimization (the content is fabulous, just saying that the links is the more important thing.
IMO this just again goes back to the content/links debate. I believe the quality links got you the ranking, but the quality content got you the links. With a cruddy page, no one would have linked - esp. not good authoritative sites - and you'd be nowhere.
If one were to have a terrible content article and somehow get lots of great quality natural links, they'd rank very well too. That said, that's not very likely at all. The only links that are "easy" to get if one tries are generally lower quality. To get great quality links from other great sites it typically takes truly valueable content. Thus, the link arguement is not as outdated as we might think - its just skewed more towards quality links.
Hilariously, if you hit a search for search engine ranking factors (with the added "engine" term), the page won't show up... Ridiculous. I think that means it wasn't manually yanked, though, which suggests that Helza is right - you can brutally link force your way out of the box page by page.
I think that it is indeed due to the high number of inbound links. The weight of all the inbound links in total are stronger then the sandbox penalty your experiencing. Causing your site to outrank the other sites linking to this article.
Getting links like this in Del.icio.us
https://del.icio.us/url/6e886d256c2bf26046fab9485537b7e9
means people are bookmarking, linking from blogs, and bookmarks, which does wonders on getting out of the box.
Rand, would you be so kind as to place a printer friendly version of that article now? :)
My bet is that the high level authorship marks sprug it from the box. lol