Is your new website nowhere to be found on Google? Hearing rumours about this thing called the Google Sandbox? There is a lot of conflicting information out there about Google’s practice of penalizing, or giving a ‘time out’ to new
websites until they know that they’re not ‘spammy’. The following tale outlines my experience with this phenomenon.
Earlier this year, I launched two new
websites for the same client. One was
www.maplegroveguesthouse.ca, the other was
www.horseplayparties.ca.
The Maple Grove site went right to the front page of Google for the search term ‘accommodation duncan’ a moderately tough search term to rank with, while the Horse Play site couldn’t be found in the top one thousand search results for ‘pony party duncan’…not for months, even though there is no competition for that search term.
I did a LOT of research, was convinced I had violated some Google rule, and continually tweaked the site and asked Google to reconsider. Nothing.
I went to two different popular SEO forums, both moderated by highly regarded SEO experts who both said my only problem was that I didn’t have enough ‘quality back links’ to the site. There is not a lot of competition for pony parties for kids in Duncan, BC Canada and the Horse Play site had just as many back links as the Maple Grove site – which was doing great in the rankings.
This is how I learned about the fabled Google ‘Sandbox’. There seem to be many professionals out there who swear that there’s no such thing, and it seems that Google will not admit that this practice exists, but I now know for sure that it does.
There was a crucial difference between these two
websites. The Maple Grove web address had been used with a
home made website for a few months before I built a new site and uploaded it to www.maplegroveguesthouse.ca – which was already known to Google. www.horseplayparties.ca was a brand new domain. Therefore unknown to Google and it seems, untrusted.
I checked the rankings for our keywords periodically, while trying to reassure my client that:
- it wasn’t my fault and
- the only thing we could do was wait.
Trust me, that was a tough sell. Especially since I didn’t know what would happen myself.
Our ranking was literally nowhere. The site did not show up in the first hundred pages. That’s at least a thousand sites – most completely unrelated to my search – but not my site. And then one day, after about 90 long days…POOF! The site was number 1!
And then there’s this site. The Box 9 Design site started out on www.box9.ca and had the same ranking problem. In my SEO research I learned that using your main keywords in your domain name can help with ranking for those terms. So, I began using www.victoria-web-design.ca hoping to rank on the first page of results for the search term ‘victoria
web design’ – a highly competitive search term. It took 8 months to pop up on Google’s search results. I hit page 5 and then a few days later jumped to page 3 where I remain today. Now it’s going to be backlinks that get me onto page one, but it certainly wasn’t a lack of backlinks that kept me at 1,000 plus for the first 8 months.
I’ve written this post for my clients who may have a new domain name and are wondering where it is in the rankings and also for others who are new to
web design and search engine optimization who may be searching around for reasons that their site or sites are not ranking in Google.
Please feel free to share your experiences in the comments section.
Tags:
seo
