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Another possible google penalty. Sandbox to blame?

Last week I discussed Admish.com possibly being hit with a googe penalty because it didn’t rank in google for its own domain name. My readers speculated that it could have been caused by paid links or the sandbox. But unless google divulges its algo we will never know for sure.

However, I have come across a myspace resource site that seems to have run into a similar ranking problem as admish.com. The site in question is www.blingcheese.com. Although blingcheese isn’t banned from google and has a pagerank of five, from my inspection it doesn’t seem to be able to rank in google for any of its targeted keywords.

But you may be wondering what is the purpose of analyzing these sites. By analyzing why certain sites aren’t able to rank well, webmasters can learn which SEO mistakes to avoid. Although I obviously can’t tell you exactly how to rank better (I doubt any other blogger is gonna tell you either), by analyzing why certain sites fail to rank we can try to extrapolate a set of rules or guidelines that will be helpful when trying to perform SEO in the future. The culprit for these penalties is  almostnever as simple as ‘keyword stuffing’ or ‘meta stuffing’. The causes tend to be more more subtle.

Here are some vital SEO stats regarding www.blingcheese.com:

1. Possible authority site. Performing a google search of its domain reveals sub links, which is indicitive of authority status.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=blingcheese.com&btnG=Search

2. Pagerank of 5

3. Google shows over 2000 inbound links
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=link%3Awww.blingcheese.com&btnG=Search

A lot of these links are from established, high PR, myspace resource sites like ww.mypsace.org

4. A whois lookup reveals that the domain is roughly seven months old

5. Clean, well designed site layout.

6. Keyword rich title tags and mta tags.

7. Google shows over 1,500 pages indexed

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.blingcheese.com&btnG=Search

Overall, blingcheese.com is an established site that should be able to rank well in google for its targeted keywords. It has a lot of inbound links, plenty of indexed pages, and a high pagerank.

However, it doesn’t rank well in google in spite of all these positive SEO factors, which confounds me.

Blingcheese has an inbound link from http://www.quizmymates.com/ with the anchor text ‘myspace comments’ yet blingcheese doesn’t rank anywhere in the first four pages for that keyword.

Nor does it rank anywhere for ‘myspace graphics’ which is in the title tag of the homepage.

If you extract keywords from blingheese’s meta data such as “Free Animated MySpace Glitter Graphic”
you can see that it doesn’t rank in the top ten in google for that long sring of keywords.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Free+Animated+MySpace+Glitter+Graphic&btnG=Search

Nor does it rank well for any other 4 keyword combinations in the meta tags.

It is disconcerting that google would suppress the rankings of a site that has all the qualifications to rank well. It is possible that the site is still in the sandbox, but it has a lot of inbound links and appears top be an authority site and the doain is already seven months old. The sandbox shouldn’t take this long. There is no keyword stuffing, no spam pages. The layout is professional, and the on-site and off-site SEO is thorough.

If my readers can try to help solve this puzzle it would be appreciated.

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