using the link operator, being sandboxed?

some general questions that have been nagging me.

[youfoundjake]

Hi all, I have about a 150 page site, google see's only 33 pages, all but the index are supplemental
I have a PR5 on the homepage
All content was written by me about a particular subject, 50 pages are basically the same, just the only difference is how it pertains to that state.
I have a blog, a forum, and a newsletter.
when i do link:www.example.com I get a return of 1-1 of 9, and the only one that shows is a site that scraped off of wikipedia.
when i do a search on yahoo or msn for the range of keywords "blue widget specs" with out the quotes, i'm number 1 and 2, but nowhere to be found on google unless i include the quotes.
I can't even begin to start about my main keyword blue widgets as it returns 81 million results from google.
The site has been around for 5 months, and I know of about 8 external links to it. Does it take 1000 inbound links in order for google to recognize me? If thats the case, then I'm toast. I'd rather not have to pay for ads to get people to the site, but through natural search results. I've stuck pretty close to the WebmasterWorld article on successful site with google in 12 months... do i just have to wait my turn?
I'm adding content frequently, and even added an rss feed. Anyone else have any ideas?

[youfoundjake]

Now it seems "blue widget specs" in quotes doesn't even bring up my site anymore, I can't see that page indexed in google either. Dang it.

[youfoundjake]

I removed the sitemap.xml from google's sitemap, and now i have 40 pages being indexed up from 33, and 9 of them are not supplements up from 1 (the index.htm), but the rest are. So I think that removing the sitemap helped so far, but I will continue to take a look at it. Its getting better, just gotta bide my time?

[JeffOstroff]

I think a lot of people erroneously blame Sitemaps for their woes. People have been reporting issues like your for years - long before Sitemaps cam on the scene.

I am a success story, I signed up to Sitemaps 2 months ago when one of our sites that used to enjoy Top 10 fell to several hundred, mostly because of scraper sites duplicating our content. On Google's contoversial update on June 27, we got our rankings almost back to to normal.

Was it sitemaps? Who knows, but the info that the program gives you on when they crawl your sites and what errors they find are priceless.

The biggest benefit of Sitemaps program: YOU CAN TELL GOOGLE HOW OFTEN TO CRAWL EACH PAGE IN YOUR SITEMAP.XML FILE!

One other thing too, the LINK: operator in Google purposely does not show you all the links, so go run it on Yahoo for a a more accurate listing. Google does not want you to know how much they know about your site, in an efforet to thwart spammers.

For example, on our bridal tips site Google showed only 145 pages linking ot us. On Yahoo, they showed 1800.

[edited by: JeffOstroff at 7:56 pm (utc) on July 12, 2006]

[youfoundjake]

Unfortunately yahoo does not recognize the link:www.example.com operator, which one did you use?
I'm not saying anything bad about sitemaps, It worked for me initially as well, but after big daddy and june 27th, all my pages were dropped except for the index. Once they did come back, all of them were supps. After removing the sitemap, the SERPS are looking alot cleaner.

[manca]

youfoundjake:

To check your links on yahoo use linkdomain: query.
As for 27th June update, don't be scared...It just refreshed the old data (according to Matt Cutts), and all pages should back to normal in a week or 2. Many many sites got hit bad with this update, and I think it's just Google's mistake, but let's hope everything will be cleared out soon!

[youfoundjake]

Thanks, yahoo shows 34, some of them are my site, the others I knew about, some are adword ads that got cached when slurp stopped by...

[youfoundjake]

OK, a little update. I just observed that I went from PR5 to PR2 in the course of 12 hours. I again did a site:www.example.com search and now its only showing 1 of 1. Its the same scraper site pulling content from wikipedia. Is this my punishment for removing my sitemap from googles toolbox?