How to tell if you may be in the sandbox...

1. The site is on a new domain and less than about 1 year old
2. The keywords you are trying to rank on are considered competitive.
3. Most of the pages of the site has been indexed by Google.
4. The site ranks well for its' competitive keywords in Yahoo and MSN
5. The site ranks well for the non-competitive keywords on Google.
6. The Googlebot visits and crawls the site on a regular basis.
7. The site ranks well for an allinanchor:"your keywords" search.
8. The site has a decent number of unique IBL's and an OK PR
9. The site does not have anything known to cause a ban or penalty.
10. The site has decent SEO
11. The site does not rank in the top 300-400 for it's main keyword.


If your site does not have all 11 things I listed above, then you just rank poorly.

Okay, now I know that my keywords just rank poorly!