Posted by peter on December 10, 2008 | No Comments
The Google Sand Box is not something that Larry and Sergy play in at lunch time (apologies for the crummy joke!), but it is a theory put about by webmasters to explain the strange effect of new sites in the Google Index.
The reason I say it’s a theory is because Google have not come out and said that such a filter exists.
What seems to happen with new sites is that they originally get some good rankings for 24-72 hours, but then they drop off badly. Then for the next 3-9 months, the site can’t seem to break above the 50th ranking, despite a lot of promotions by the website owner.
The theory says that it’s because Google doesn’t know if the new site is a trustworthy source of information and the Sandbox was created to stop blackhat SEO’s creating hundreds of new sites and getting very quick rankings. It’s in effect, thought to be a spam filter for the search engine.
Apart from age, the only way it seems to overcome the sandbox effect is to keep doing link building or to get some links from very high authority (pagerank 6-10) websites.
What some webmasters do, is buy domains and let them ‘age’ for several months before creating a site for it. Some webmasters even go as far as buying domains that are already aged.
If you are not in a position to buy aged domains or get high authority links, then the Sandbox is just something you will have to grin and bear for the next few months. You should not stop building links because it seems to have no effect, once your site breaks out of the sandbox (if it exists!), there will be no stopping you!
Posted by peter on December 4, 2008 | 5 Comments
A question that is becoming more and more common recently is “why is my new site getting good rankings and then disappearing from Google altogether?”.
It’s a valid question, because there are few things more satisfying than seeing your website at the top of Google, and probably few things more frustrating and sout destroying than seeing that ranking taken away from you the next day.
Well, if this is happening to you, take heart, it’s not unique to you and this is happening to a lot of other people out there.
The scenario is so familiar…
- You create a new site
- You link to it from a few places like in forums
- You wait 48 hours
- Yeah! There it is, high rankings and ready to rock
- 2 days later…there’s no sign of it.
- Cry
So, what can you do? This is happening to lots of other sites. For some reason Google now indexes your site very fast, temporarily gives you good rankings and then your site disappears altogether, often for up to a week.
Don’t worry though, more often than not, your site will reappear, but don’t expect good rankings over night.
Getting good rankings is a combination of factors, although it’s mostly centered around getting back links.
Posted by peter on December 3, 2008 | No Comments
Continuing our series of SEO questions, this one concentrates on the age old question of ‘why are my backlinks not showing up in Google?’
The webmaster forums like digitalpoint are awash with new webmasters who, between posting about why their pagerank hasn’t updated, are asking why Google doesn’t show all their backlinks.
For those of you who are not aware, if you go to Google (or most major search engines) and type:
link:www.domain.com
It will tell you how many backlinks you have to your site. Backlinks, of course, are the major factor in ranking websites. The maths (I’m from the UK) is simple: The greater the number of backlinks, the higher your search engine rankings.
OK, so there’s a tiny bit more to it than that, but all said and done, this is it.
Now, the problem arises when you go to see if all your hardwork has paid off, you know you’ve been approved in thousands of directories, so you are expecting to see a nice healthy number here.
You check and Google says that it found 4 back links. What happened to the other 996?!
The reason for this is that Google, for reasons known only to itself, only shows a portion of indexed links it has for your site. So what ever Google says, you can be safe in the knowledge that the actual number is a lot higher, and they are just choosing not to show you.
Sidenote: there are a number of conspiracy theories out there about why this is. The most popular is that Google wants to protect it’s indexing algorithm.
So now it begs the question, where can you go to accurately find the number of backlinks to your site? In days gone by, it used to be MSN/Live, but they have a pants search engine now, so the place to go is Yahoo Site Explorer.
This search engine will give you a treasure trove of information. All those crappy indexes, all those shady link exchanges will show up here.
Posted by peter on December 1, 2008 | No Comments
This is an extremely common question from newbie Webmasters (and alarmingly, sometimes more experienced ones too!).
The problem arises due to the lack of understanding on what Pagerank is, and how it works.
So often we see people in the webmaster forums asking questions like
- I’ve done so much promotion, why hasn’t my pagerank updated?
- HELP! I’ve got loads of backlinks, but no pagerank
- Is there a problem with pagerank? Mine hasn’t been updated in the last few weeks
More worrying is when you see statements like…
- I got a pagerank 2 after just 3 weeks!
- My new site went from 0 to PR 3 in a month, hope to get pr 5 next month!
So, back to the question, why isn’t your pagerank updated in the last few months, despite doing loads of promotion?
The answer is extremely simple:
Google only updates the pagerank that you see on the toolbar 3 or 4 times a year. That means if Google last updated their pagerank in April, and you started your site in May, you might not see an update until August or even September!
However, this pagerank that we see in the toolbar is a snapshot of what Google had several months ago. Their internal pagerank updates each day for all the pages on your site, but they don’t make this data public. Instead, they just export a ’snapshot’ a few times a year.
So, stop fretting over the fact that you don’t have that magic green stuff in the little bar yet. The next pagerank is just a few months away!