Was Rand Completely Wrong? SEOMOZ Blog Gets it Totally Wrong!

[Sam Dodd]

Ok first of all I need to preface this. I read SEOMOZ.ORG every day. I love the site, I think it has the most usefull SEO information on the web and as soon as I get my bosses approval I will be a premium member. With that said, He analyized Hamids Website in one of his blog posts about the google penalty and I think he totally missed the boat and got it completely wrong. Let me explain. Here is what he said for those to lazy to read his posts.

"Just to help out, I'm going to walk through a quick example from someone in the RealEstateWebmasters.com forum's thread:

We'll start with Hgrealtor's site - www.oaklandhomespecialist.com
The site's still indexed - it has 94 pages in Google
It ranks #1 on a search for the brand name - oaklandhomespecialist - that tells me we're not dealing with a "sandbox"-like effect
It's ranking #67 on a search of the home page's full title tag - Oakland Real Estate | Oakland California Homes for Sale | Realtor - that's definitely a bad sign
On the plus side, they rank #7 for - crocker highlands homes - so they're not as badly buried as others I've seen
And, they're #3 for temescal homes
This leads me to believe that while they might have had some of their links de-valued, the site isn't in grave danger, or even necessarily in need of a re-inclusion request."

Anyways Here is where I think he got it wrong "It ranks #1 on a search for the brand name - oaklandhomespecialist - that tells me we're not dealing with a "sandbox"-like effect"

As many of us know Hamid had a new site and his links were maturing or whatever you want to call it. He was in fact in the New Website Sandbox (I think he might be out now) Anyways while I think Rands methods work for older site he somehow missed that this was a brand new site with immature links.

Let me know what you think? Am I completely wrong? I have been before trust me.

[MarcinSarasota]

I don't think this site is penalized since it ranks #1 for his name. Search for Hamid Grinage - www.oaklandhomespecialist.com comes as #1.

[Sam Dodd]

When you are sandboxed you can rank for obscure terms and not Real Estate Terms.

[Sam Dodd]

look at my new website. www. southernutahrealestateagent .com it ranks for none real estate/none competitive terms all over the place but real estate terms im in the 50's. Age of Links matters

[MarcinSarasota]

I won't argue with that but if he was penalized he would not even rank for his own name.

[judyo]

I also questioned that Rand used Hamid's site as an example as I thought the post was about sites that had been penalized for recip linking. My penalized site was at #1 or 2 (fighting with Homegain) for the main kw's for over 2 yrs.

Last I checked it's still on page 5. It doesn't come up for anything, not my name, not any obscure kw phrase (that I've tried).

So I don't think Hamid's site was ever penalized, as you've said, it's just new. I don't know why Rand chose it as an example of sites that were penalized as I don't think this site is or was. Maybe one of us needs to give him a site that we know was penalized.

[Sam Dodd]

Rand was saying Hamid was never penalized. You guys are confusing what I am saying here. (Im not disagreeing with what your saying just clearifying my points)

You see when you have a new site and you get to many links to fast, google puts you in the sandbox. Therefore Rand saying Hamid wasn't sandboxed was lazy analysis of his site. Hamid climbed to #9 for Oakland in one day due to his links aging. Anyways I agree he should have used one of you alls websites as an example since Hamid was never penalized.

Also I want to point out that google sucks for doing this to only like 10 people. Way to go google. You arent smart enough to do it with the algo so you resort to scare tatics.

[Lydia]

I haven't read the blog post you referenced, but from the data quoted I would think it's reasonable to suspect that the site was indeed sandboxed. No penalty there. It looks like he misinterpreted the results.

[Edit after reading the blog post] He was correct in saying there was no need of a re-inclusion request, though.

[judyo]

I read Rand's post last week so didn't remember that he was saying Hamid's site was not penalized. Still don't know (& didn't then) why he used that site as an example to begin with, though.

[Micheal Pannell Realtor]

i was thinking the same thing when i read that blog a week ago, but didnt want to say anything