All Posts Tagged With: "sandbox"
Ideas for Starting New Blogs - Part 3
On Blogs for Sale we have been writing a series of articles about ideas for starting new blogs. We have been discussing a site we started called “Hurricane Tracking Sites“. This site was started, indexed by Google, and getting hundreds of hits in a matter of hours.
Now, after spending six weeks as a page i Google result for the keywords “hurricane tracking sites” it has vanished from the Search Engine results. It is not in the the top 1000 results. The site has been effectively sandboxed.
What is a sandbox. Here is the Wikipedia definition:
The Sandbox (a.k.a. Sandboxing or the sandbox effect) is a phenomenon that people have claimed to observe in the ranking of web pages that is performed by Google. It is the subject of much debate. Its existence has not been confirmed, and several observers state that they have observed the contrary to what is claimed for this perceived phenomenon.
The phenomenon that people have claimed to observe is that Google temporarily reduces the page rank of new domains, placing them into what is referred to as its “sandbox”, in an effort to counter the ways that search engine optimizers attempt to manipulate Google’s page ranking to bring sites to the top, by creating lots of inbound links to a new web site from other web sites that they own before creating that web site. A “reverse sandbox” effect is also claimed to exist, whereby new pages with good content but without inbound links are temporarily increased in rank, much like the “New Releases” in a book store are displayed more prominently, to encourage organic building of the World Wide Web.
David George disputes the claim, made by some, that Google applies sandboxing to all new web sites, saying that the claim “doesn’t seem to be born out by experience”. He states that he created a new web site in October 2004 and had it ranked in the top 20 Google results for a target keyword within 1 month. He avers that “[n]o one knows for sure if the Google sandbox exists”, and comments that it “seems to fit the observations and experients of many search engine optimizers”. He theorizes that the sandbox “has introduced some hysteresis into the system in order to restore a bit of sanity to Google’s results”.
Matt Cutts has stated in an interview that “there are some things in the algorithm that may be perceived as a sandbox that doesn’t apply to all industries”.
The site will eventually come back. It could be back in three months, or it could take a year. This is perhaps one fo the best reasons to buy a blog that has been around for a while. If I was depending on the Hurricane Tracking Sites blog has an integral part of my blogging business and I had to wait out the sandbox effect it could be very frustrating. My hope is that the site comes back before the next hurricane season starts.
Blogs For Sale - Part 1
If you are considering starting a blog for business, there are some real positives to buying a blog that has been set up and established. Google seems to take notice of sites a lot faster that have been around for a while. One of the big reasons people aren’t successful with a blogging business is that they give up to quickly. It takes time for your blog to develop. For example, when I put this Blogs For Sale site up, I pointed one link to it from my main site My Newbie Blog which is about how to create a blog. One day after I changed the privacy setting on the blog to get noticed by the search engine, Google indexed the site. One day. When I first started blogging my sites would take weeks (3 - 6) to get indexed. Until Google indexes your site it will not show up on searches.
The Sandbox
Another reason to buy a blog that has been around for a while is that you might escape the Google Sandbox. The sandbox effect takes your new blog and doesn’t allow it to play with the more established sites. Google denies the sandbox, but it happens too often to not be valid. I have sites that disappear from the results for months and then suddenly reappear. When they come back they are usually positioned well and then move up quickly, but you could be in the sandbox for months. For a new blogging business this can be very frustrating. While there is no guarantee that buying a site with some age on it will keep you out of the sandbox, it is less likely and if it does happen it shouldn’t last for long.
In an interview on Hubspot.com with Courtney Tuttle (Court has a very successful blog called Court’s Marketing School) this question was asked:
According to the Website Grader free SEO tool, your site has a score of 99/100. Your website has been around about 2 years, you have 2,500 pages indexed by Google, almost 100,000 inbound links and a PageRank of 5. How did you accomplish this in such a short amount of time?
This was Court’s answer:
During the first year, I simply put the site online and let it age. To Google, there is a huge difference between a site that is over a year old and a site that is brand new. For this reason, I focused on other projects until my site hit the 1-year mark.
After the entire first year, I had less than 5 inbound links, a Page Rank of 0, and exactly 1 page in Google’s index. It was at that point that I started blogging. Since SEO is my background, that’s the primary method that was used to build the site, which now gets over 1,000 visitors each day from search engines. Add social media, direct traffic, and referral traffic to the mix and it makes for some pretty big days. You then have to take those people and provide them with information that they can trust, which will turn them into a regular reader.
Regular readers that are industry-related bloggers will produce a huge amount of links for you, in any niche. If you can provide that traffic with something that excites them, they will link to your site to tell their readers. I was able to generate 100,000 links in one year because I was able to do that again and again.
At Blogs For Sale we are setting up these blogs with you in mind. We are aging them and pointing links at them. We will write articles targeting a set of keywords for you to begin your business with. Having a seasoned blog will allow your blogging business to get off to a good start.
