Google Sandbox
Google Sandbox – is it real? Who knows…..who cares.
What I have been noticing in this industry is there’s a lot of people trying to reinvent the wheel, and most of it is a joke.
I own a few domains, and I have never had a site ’sandboxed’. I have ranked for many domains, and they still rank till this day.
The last joke I heard was about Google Branding. I’m not sure if the search engines are hiring people to mislead others or what.
Back to the Sandbox…
The Google Sandbox is considered a ‘probationary period’ given to a new website. Even though your website may have a high Pagerank, lots of backlinks, and quality content it will not rank high in the SERPs. This filter is said to be placed on ‘new websites’.
Here’s how I avoid being in the sandbox
1. Post new content every day, other day, or once per week.
2. Interlink the pages on your website. If Google finds one page then they’ll find the others because you’re interlinking.
3. Place a nofollow link attribute on all irrevelant external AND internal links. This is very important because you can’t control how long the robots will be on your website, but at least you can control where they go. This will make the crawl more effective, and they wont waste time on pages that do not matter.
4. Obtain ‘quality backlinks’ to your website. Here’s another issue that new websites have. Most people would send a backlink to their homepage, but will not get backlinks for other pages on their site. If you do a link:domain.com on Yahoo, you will see a large amount of backlinks to the homepage, but not to the rest of the site. I do about 40-50% backlinks to the homepage, and the rest to individual pages on my website. Make sure to also obtain links that are DOFOLLOW to your site.
5. Stop constantly changing the meta tag title or description! Just like the content…you need to make sure it’s perfect before broadcasting the page. Changing the meta tag title can have a huge impact in the SERPs. I changed my homepage meta tag title, and went from middle of page 3 for the keyword seo, to the bottom of page 4.
6. Buy a domain that contains the keywords or buy an old domain. I have seen this many times where the website ranks in the top #5 for competitive keyterms just because of the age of the domain or because the keywords are included in the domain name.
Obtaining quality backlinks to your website is easily said than done. Will you suggest the program like inlink to acquire backlinks? I am looking for some advice.
there’s a few places you can ‘easily’ get links from.
they may not have a lot of value, but they will get you out of the gray bar
1. forum signature links
2. post on other blogs
3. create free blog accounts on blogger or other websites, and point links to your site
4. submit to directories
5. submit to social media like digg
I know many people say that directories don’t work anymore, and they are mostly talking about the link juice from Google. But what about the real people? I found this site from Blogskinny. I’m assuming the site owner (or their staff) put it in there. I saw it, it looked interesting, so I followed the link.
So while directories may not be the SEO mecca they once were, they are still worth doing if mixed in with the other stuff mentioned above.
here’s my disclaimer on the directories..
get a backlink from directories that get ‘indexed’
we both know that there are FEW directories that get the whole site indexed.
Excellent point. I agree with you.
I have to agree with you on the sandbox as if you do what is needed, content links, etc. (the standard stuff to maintain your website, then the sandbox will really never be an issue.
With that being said I have not noticed anything related to the sandbox in the past year or more. I know the sandbox was a huge issue back in the day, but I have seen new domains in the past few years rank very well within months. Keep in mind these are domains that were ranked for not super broad phrases.
I thought the sandbox was dead, it seems that way.