Another update passed by and still the sandbox continues. Does anyone know anyone in yahoo HQ Any guesses when this morbid sandbox will go away?

I would also enjoy hearing the answer to that question

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285 Columbus Lofts - New 63-unit Boston loft development in the former Red Cross building
FP3 Boston Condos - FP3 Fort Point Channel Boston Seaport Condos
Court Square Press Lofts - High-end luxury amenity loft building in South Boston featuring 130 condos

I haven't experienced a yahoo sandbox. I put up a site less than a month ago and it alternates between 10 and 11.

Which site Frobn?

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Marc Rasmussen
Michael Saunders and Company

Sarasota, FL Real Estate
Sarasota Real Estate

The site is not a real estate site. I haven't done much work on it except to put some articles and pages to attract the search engines. I am experimenting with internal linking strategies on this site and several others. I was surprised to see it #1 in MSN for the main key words and to #10-11 in Yahoo so quickly.

The site is http://keywestpersonaltrainer.com, main key words "Key West Personal Trainer" and "Key West fitness consultant"

Just checked and it now is #3 for Key West Fitness Consultant
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=key...ess+consultant

The key words are not competitive but the fact that it is in Yahoo at all tells us at least for personal trainer sites there is no yahoo sandbox. It is possible but unlikely that real estate sites, because of their competiveness, go into a yahoo sandbox.

Google does have the site sandboxed, and what comes up #1 & #2 for Key West Fitness Consultant are sites linking to it. This gives insight into how google and search engines in general treat outgoing links.

One of the things we observed with the Yahoo sandbox is that it did in fact allow our sites to rank right away for a period of just under a month, then they were taken right out of the top one thousand. I believe (Mert correct me if Im wrong) that we were first page for "chicago real estate" and then dissappeared on that strange update when it appeared that we first noticed the yahoo sandbox.

I would be interested in seeing where this site lands on Yahoo after an update or 2

Another possibility is that yahoo might apply its sandbox reletive to your linking. IE if you have a strong linking campaign you get boxed for longer (If at all) vs a site that is not tripping the sandbox as its links arent really competitive nor are its keywords

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Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles [Of Google] will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit. Google.com

Right before the update when the sandbox started for a 36 hour period I was number 15. and before that # 300+ something but since then nada nothing. Heck the last update process took my entire pages out of the index completely for 24 hours.. I had not even ranked for my company name Falcon Living but now I do.

Excellent point. A few other SEOs that I talked to believe that too many links too soon will result in a yahoo penalty. One thing for certain I am not going after a lot links, I have a different link strategy in mind for this site that I think will work while helping some of my other sites.

You may have over optimized. I checked your key word density and you are at 10.54% for "chicago real estate." I am out of my my territory here as I don't usually pay attention to kw density except to keep it under 3% (personal preference). When I went to your site it was apparent that your kw density was high. You might try substituting other phases that are peculiar to chicago real estate or are associated in some way. All the search engines are experimenting with latent semantic indexing.

There is a related discussion on "yahoo penalty" going on at http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum35/3595.htm. Seems Yahoo caused some major disruptions over the weekend. Several months ago I mused that Yahoo was going through an identity crisis, now I am pretty much convinced they have gone deeper and deeper into it.