Those of us that struggle to get our clients to the top in the returned results know that Google appears to put new sites in a sandbox, or playground area. Your brand-new site may stay there for 6-8 months, and there doesn’t appear to be anything you can do about it. Meanwhile, you get a top slot in Yahoo and MSN. What happened?
Although the sandbox may appear real, there may be good reason to believe that Google isn’t really doing anything special with your site. The rules that Google uses to position your site may be doing what appears to be a sandbox affect.
Let’s look at some of those rules and see why this is true.
- If all else is equal, an older site will position better that a newer site. Google doesn’t like mom and pop sites. If your site has been around a while, Google figures you are here to stay.
- If you add links too fast, Google will penalize you. Unless you are doing something very special, fast link building is assumed as forced and unnatural. Google wants you to build your links naturally. With a new site, you are often trying to get a lot of links in a short time. To Google, that’s spamming.
- Google favors sites with links coming in from trusted and popular sites. That generally takes work over time. We’ve almost tripled our own visitor traffic over the last year. That takes solid work to do that.
This doesn’t mean you should wait around until your site bubbles up in the results because the sandbox is there – real or virtual. What is does mean is that you should develop a long-term strategy for your site by building links in from trusted sites. Build valuable content on your site so that other trusted sites want to link to you.
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