I just wanted to write something up to give some people some guidance. I get a lot of questions daily on the Sandbox and the Overoptimization filter on Google posed by my clients. I really wanted to address if they exist and how to fix any problems you may have. I have done some tests and finally have results that clear some things up for me.
I will start with the Sandbox, because from my prospective it is easy. I read all the time about the 3-6 month sandbox and that if you have a new site that it is impossible to rank high in the search engines regardless of your keywords popularity. I say this is crap. I just started promoting about 3 sites in November, they were all brand new and within a few weeks they were all on page one.
I am not sure I dont believe the Sandbox exists, however I know for a fact that there are methods to getting around it, even though I cant say definitively what they are. I mean how could 3 of my sites jump to page one if there was a sandbox within a month or two? If there is truly a sandbox filter, or a method that gets you put in it, I missed out on it with three sites, so maybe my methods are just superior to everyone out there who says there is a sandbox.
Now we go to overoptimization, I am sure this exisits, and this won't just hurt your rankings it will bomb your rankings. The overoptimization filter is like an atom bomb to a website. The good news, it is easily fixable and you will see rankings improvement in a few days. Here was my test for that. I had a very competitive keyword, two weeks after launching my site I was number five on Google, great promotion, everything going good, then one day I searched just because I do that every day because I am so proud of myself, and the site was gone. I don't mean it had dropped from page one, I mean it was gone from the index. I went through every page of Google for that keyword and it was gone. When I searched for my domain name including the dot com I didn't even rank on the first page for that.
My first thought was oh darn after all this luck of not having a site in the sandbox it got me. Well I guess that site is done for 6 months or more, so I kept link building but I did nothing to the site. One day it will just jump out of the sandbox to number one. I also decided that it was possible that all my sites may have this happen, and then what? I freaked, I was watching my rankings all the time, I would even go to the page my site was on and sit there for 5 minutes and refresh it just to make sure the site stayed. After about a month I decided I didn't care, I wasn't waiting 6 months, I would make some changes to the site, if that didn't work, new domain start over, because I had beat the sandbox with 2 other domains. I made one little change. I had my main keywords in an H1 tag at the top of my site, I changed it, I took my keywords out. A few days later when Google cached my site... I was back in the index. I wasn't sandboxed, afterall, I overoptimized the site.
The results of this test were impressive. I jumped from not being indexed to being just over position 100. I have since made another change reducing my keyword density some more. I found that my keyword density for my main keywords was about 4% which people in forums, who I dont believe know a lot, say is good, somewhere between 3-7 percent. The sites ranked for this keyword have a density for the phrase somewhere between 0-1%. I am now waiting to see what this reduction does for my rankings.
Until today really, I was a believer that no matter what, it made no difference what was on your site, if you had a good method of building links, which I do, you would rank well in Google. The reason is I didn't think Google could weigh much on what a webmaster could control. What I really learned is that changes to your page may not improve your rankings a great deal if you are already ranked good, but they sure can kill your page. You have to watch the density of your competitors and test out what modifying the density does for your rankings. If you overoptimize for any term, your site will get blasted there is no doubt. My major problem is to get a good ranking on Google I had to lower my density which was doing real good on MSN. I think though that I can handle MSN, because all my sites still rank better there than they do on Google.
So to everyone out there worried or talking about this Sandbox, if you think you are in it, you better try on page optimization because I am almost willing to bet you are over optimized, not in the sandbox. Especially if you havent been indexed in 6 months. I would be checking my strategies if what I was doing was not helping me get up there in 6 months. Every site I have had has made at least page 2 for competitive keywords in about 2 months.
My secret tip of the day, what do I do so differently? Here is one... I don't link to anybody. I don't exchange links nor do my sites have a single outbound link on them. Why? Because I know for sure that I can be punished for people that I link to, but not for the people that link to me. Therefore I just don't link to anybody and I avoid this issue.
I will start with the Sandbox, because from my prospective it is easy. I read all the time about the 3-6 month sandbox and that if you have a new site that it is impossible to rank high in the search engines regardless of your keywords popularity. I say this is crap. I just started promoting about 3 sites in November, they were all brand new and within a few weeks they were all on page one.
I am not sure I dont believe the Sandbox exists, however I know for a fact that there are methods to getting around it, even though I cant say definitively what they are. I mean how could 3 of my sites jump to page one if there was a sandbox within a month or two? If there is truly a sandbox filter, or a method that gets you put in it, I missed out on it with three sites, so maybe my methods are just superior to everyone out there who says there is a sandbox.
Now we go to overoptimization, I am sure this exisits, and this won't just hurt your rankings it will bomb your rankings. The overoptimization filter is like an atom bomb to a website. The good news, it is easily fixable and you will see rankings improvement in a few days. Here was my test for that. I had a very competitive keyword, two weeks after launching my site I was number five on Google, great promotion, everything going good, then one day I searched just because I do that every day because I am so proud of myself, and the site was gone. I don't mean it had dropped from page one, I mean it was gone from the index. I went through every page of Google for that keyword and it was gone. When I searched for my domain name including the dot com I didn't even rank on the first page for that.
My first thought was oh darn after all this luck of not having a site in the sandbox it got me. Well I guess that site is done for 6 months or more, so I kept link building but I did nothing to the site. One day it will just jump out of the sandbox to number one. I also decided that it was possible that all my sites may have this happen, and then what? I freaked, I was watching my rankings all the time, I would even go to the page my site was on and sit there for 5 minutes and refresh it just to make sure the site stayed. After about a month I decided I didn't care, I wasn't waiting 6 months, I would make some changes to the site, if that didn't work, new domain start over, because I had beat the sandbox with 2 other domains. I made one little change. I had my main keywords in an H1 tag at the top of my site, I changed it, I took my keywords out. A few days later when Google cached my site... I was back in the index. I wasn't sandboxed, afterall, I overoptimized the site.
The results of this test were impressive. I jumped from not being indexed to being just over position 100. I have since made another change reducing my keyword density some more. I found that my keyword density for my main keywords was about 4% which people in forums, who I dont believe know a lot, say is good, somewhere between 3-7 percent. The sites ranked for this keyword have a density for the phrase somewhere between 0-1%. I am now waiting to see what this reduction does for my rankings.
Until today really, I was a believer that no matter what, it made no difference what was on your site, if you had a good method of building links, which I do, you would rank well in Google. The reason is I didn't think Google could weigh much on what a webmaster could control. What I really learned is that changes to your page may not improve your rankings a great deal if you are already ranked good, but they sure can kill your page. You have to watch the density of your competitors and test out what modifying the density does for your rankings. If you overoptimize for any term, your site will get blasted there is no doubt. My major problem is to get a good ranking on Google I had to lower my density which was doing real good on MSN. I think though that I can handle MSN, because all my sites still rank better there than they do on Google.
So to everyone out there worried or talking about this Sandbox, if you think you are in it, you better try on page optimization because I am almost willing to bet you are over optimized, not in the sandbox. Especially if you havent been indexed in 6 months. I would be checking my strategies if what I was doing was not helping me get up there in 6 months. Every site I have had has made at least page 2 for competitive keywords in about 2 months.
My secret tip of the day, what do I do so differently? Here is one... I don't link to anybody. I don't exchange links nor do my sites have a single outbound link on them. Why? Because I know for sure that I can be punished for people that I link to, but not for the people that link to me. Therefore I just don't link to anybody and I avoid this issue.
About the Author:
Brent Sweet has several online businesses. He feels the basis of his business to rank number one. That means each day for each business his focus is SEO. His businesses offer things like Cheapest Hotels, Legitimate Online Jobs, Birdhouses, and he offers Article Submission.
No comments:
Post a Comment