We recently launched a new site for a client. In fact it was a staggered launch of 3 different sites, a .com, .com.au and .co.uk - based on the same template but with focused unique content on each and regionalised with flags and wording.

The main focus initially was on the .com(US) as it was launched in early Feb - trying to catch the end of the northern hemisphere winter. The .co.uk(UK) and .com.au(AU) were to be launched later, and ended up being launched in mid April (AU) and end of Apil (UK).

The US domain was bought in January 2009, the UK and AU domains in mid-March 2009.

We analysed and tracked 146 high value keyword terms from the beginning and these ranged in “value” from very high traffic, extreme competition to lower hanging fruit which are product and colour specific searches, obviously with less searches, but likely to convert at higher rates. We also input about 20 of the strongest competitors online to track against the competition - where there is 1 large competitor and many smaller/medium sized sites ranking.

The sites were designed - which made them better than 95% of sites in the index for this range of products - probably only 2-3 websites in the World that are better in all reality, so its likely to be 99% at present.

We optimised the onpage content, structure, layout and everything onsite as much as humanly possible, organised focused pages to keyword groupings and then set about implementing an offsite campaign of linking.

Having launched we expected there to be a lag in rankings for all sites, while Google crawled and searched and indexed pages. We were surprised with the US site as we had a few thousand links that were 301 redirected from another prior domain, that had the same theming - we expected the US site to flourish immediately with the change over of those links .. it didn’t quite take off immediately but took a few weeks to gain traction.

Once it was up and running and smoothly gaining in rankings, we shifted focus to launch the UK and AU sites - the focus being more on the AU for the following 2 months as it was coming into Southern hemisphere winter - prime season for this product.

We saw the rankings for the AU site go skyward quite quickly and now, 2 months on it is a tie between the US and AU site. Given we shifted a lot of linking focus from the US site this was expected, but maybe not quite as quickly as we saw. The UK site was given lesser linking focus and as such had modest gains in comparison, but massive in comparison to competitors - clearly the US and AU sites consequently had much bigger gains.

At this point in time 5 months on for the US site and 2 months on for the AU and UK sites .. the US and AU sites are respectively 2nd and 3rd for the amount of rankings in the top 30 and visibility, just below the monster competitor. The UK site is in the middle of a pack of about 7-10 medium sized competitors. What is interesting is that the monster competitor has actually been climbing at a similar rate as the US site since the beginning - didn’t expect that, we expected to be level pegging with the monster by August! - might have to revise that one!! .. lol

So whats the moral of this story? -

I really was thinking that the sandbox doesn’t exist, but I think its more about the power of links you can exert on a site to overcome any kind of sandboxing affect that there might be. Or it could be that links are sandboxed, not sites .. so you need a certain quantity, relative to the competition, from good sources, “link stingy” sources are better on themed topic pages.

It’s not that Google don’t hold sites back, because they likely do, but I think there is a point where sites reach threshold where they are due to get reviewed, based upon their rankings for certain terms and their link profile - so, if that happens and your website design is far superior to the competition then you will likely get a human reviewed boost and go up, or be more unleashed, and the links gain more power.

So this is my thought process .. links get you to the top 15 .. humans get you to the top 5. Pushing the links harders get you to the top 2.

Below is the image of rankigns in the top 30. The monster competitor vs US, AU and UK sites for the client.

Client rankings 24th june 2009 - Monster competitor vs clients 3 websites

Client rankings 24th june 2009 - Monster competitor vs clients 3 websites