dickbaker - 9:52 pm on Oct 1, 2004 (gmt 0)

Call it what you will: sandbox, lag effect, the Man in the Moon...it does exist.

I have a site that went up two years ago that deals with different brands of widgets. Search for "blue widgets" and it's #1 on Google.

I have a site that I submitted to G on June 14th. It's indexed about 300 out of 1500 pages.

Both sites have the brand "blue widgets" on them. Same keyword density, same everything when it comes to SEO.

A search for "blue widgets" finds my new site at about position #350 in the SERPS.

Also back in June, the owner of the company that I did the two year-old site for wanted to add a page about "red widgets." Two weeks later I checked on Google, and that site ranked #1 for "red widgets."

And, yes, I have incoming links for the new site's "blue widgets" page.

How else to explain it?