The Google "Sandbox" -- Myth or Reality?

It has been hotly debated in SEO circles for several years whether or not a new website has to go through a "waiting" period before it gets ranked in the Google index.

Those who feel that such a waiting period exists claim that a new site has to sit in some metaphorical "sandbox" for an unspecified time, until Google decides the new site is all grown up enough to play in the real search rankings.

In my experience, the sandbox doesn't exist. What exists is an algorithm -- an algorithm that says if you get some good citations to your site, you will do well in the search rankings, even if you only launched the site recently.

By the same token, if you don't get good citations, you'll never do well in the search rankings, no matter how old and doddering your site becomes.

So why did people ever call it a sandbox to begin with? I think because it makes a handy excuse for when your site doesn't rank well.

I launched a site for a fairly competitive search term about 7 months ago. It has climbed steadily to where it is now on page 3 of Google for the main term, and is pulling about 1500 visitors a day for the long tail. Now how would it be doing that if there was a sandbox?

How did it get there? The old-fashioned way -- I worked on it. Hard. And the best citations the site has gotten so far all came through an amazing technique called publicity. No fancy tricks, no magic bullet. Just good, old-fashioned, p.r. Of the the kind preached by Eric Ward, who if you don't know about, you really should.






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Diary Of An SEO Campaign

The continuing saga of a site known only as The Site, launched on 8-1-06, as it tries to reach the top 3 slots of Google for its key search term.

Day 191

The Site enjoys continuing success from my SEO efforts. Today it sits on the top of page 4 of Yahoo! results, and top of page 6 on Google. It has even flirted with page 3 of Yahoo! on recent days.

The site is now getting about 1300 unique visitors per day, from the search term tail, with a page view per visitor of around 7.0. It's important to remember that the search term we are going for here is very competitive. The top site for this term pulls about 60,000 visitors a day. It might not be MySpace, but it ain't chicken feed.

How are we doing it? For starters, it's pure white hat. I work at creating the best possible site for the target audience. Most of what works, in online marketing terms, flows from that premise.

Check out our new, daily website promotion blog for quick tips on how to do good online marketing.

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Continued Search Marketing Success for 'The Site.'

Diary of an SEO campaign

The continuing saga of a site known only as The Site, launched on 8-1-06, as it tries to reach the top 3 slots of Google for its key search term.

Day 173

Just an update on progress for The Site. Nearing the half year mark, and it continues to do well in the search engine rankings, and to draw traffic. For its top keyword phrase, which is one of the top 50 phrases on the internet, The Site is around page 6 of Google and page 5 of Yahoo!.

I continue to publish articles for the linkbacks; brainstorm for quality content (sometimes called 'linkbait', but I don't really like that term); publish a daily blog; add new content from time to time, and generally follow the rule of trying to make The Site the best site in its niche on the internet. We're up to about 850 visitors a day, with a pageview average of about 8 p/v. That's up from around 500 daily visitors just a month ago.

Onward!






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Announcing Website Promotion World

On this blog I generally publish more in-depth articles about search marketing and online marketing. My publishing frequency sometimes varies from weekly to monthly.

In order to post online marketing tips on a more frequent basis, I just launched a new blog that I hope you'll enjoy: Website Promotion World. Unlike this blog you're reading, Website Promotion World is a daily blog, offering a "fresh, hot tip every day!" The postings are short and snappy, and intended to give you a quick, usable tip on just about any aspect of search marketing, SEO, online marketing, and so forth.

Check it out, subscribe if you like it, and enjoy it with your coffee every day.






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Online Marketing Success For "The Site"

Diary of an SEO campaign

The continuing saga of a site known only as The Site, launched on 8-1-06, as it tries to reach the top 3 slots of Google for its key search term.

Day 143

You have to be patient in the Search Marketing business. But if you are, you can see things start to pay off.

"The Site" recently passed a couple of important landmarks: it broke into the top 100 for both Yahoo! and Google search rankings, for the sought-after top key phrase. It's currently on page 7 of Google and, incredibly, page 5 of Yahoo. I say "incredibly" because my experience has been that my sites, or perhaps my SEO, ranks first on MSN, then Google, then Yahoo! But "The Site" is showing up best on Yahoo! right now, although I am pleased with both rankings.

Second, I got my first day of 500 + unique visitors to the site yesterday. Another landmark. And with a sticky factor of about 6 page views per visit, I know the site is working as it should. These visitors are arriving courtesy of the "long tail" of the keyword phrase for which I am optimizing. So if my final goal is to rank on page 1 for "blue widgets," currently I am picking up traffic for lesser phrases, such as "plastic blue widgets," or "disposable blue widgets," etc.

How did "The Site" get here? By building good links and building good content. Along the way, I exploded, at least for myself, the myth of the Google sandbox. "The Site" was ranking for some decent key phrases within its first month.

What is good content? It's content that is worth linking to. I know, it sounds circular -- but the fact is, unless you are very lucky, most of us will need to produce good stuff if we want to get it found on the internet. That's what good link bait is all about. That's why people who do good link baiting can charge such exorbitant rates for it. It's nothing more than good, old-fashioned P.R., dressed up in a new suit of technologically-savvy threads. You create good content, you publicize it, you get good links, you keep on doing it, yada, yada, yada. It's not rocket science.

That's what's funny about online marketing (or search marketing if you prefer). Most people seem to think it is rocket science, and that there is some secret formula, which if you could only tap into it... but, for most of us, that's not how it is. It's just plain old hard work, common sense, and a dash of creativity.






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Rent-A-Blogger Comes To Search Marketing

Need a review of your website? Rent a blogger!

Product placement for the masses has finally arrived on the internet. The big players on the internet have been buying hosted pages, social networking "events," and other product placement tricks for a while, but finally the rest of us can buy into this particular corner of the American Dream.

Search marketing through blogs

Here's how it works -- you pay a blogger to write about you, and they give you a (usually) good review, plus that all-important link back to your site. Cool, huh? But does it work well?

Two places to buy your product placement on a blog

Two new sites have sprung up recently that offer blog placements. I tried both recently, and like many new enterprises, both left me feeling like they should have worked out some more kinks before launching.

Pay per Post describes itself as "an automated system that allows you to promote your web site, product, service, or company through the PayPerPost network of bloggers." Automated is right. I signed up with these guys to get 3 blog reviews for a website I work on, and ran into tons of aggravation with the interface, the system, and the total lack of response to my emails that I sent them. As in -- emails unanswered. The interface is about as intuitive as Yahoo! Search Marketing, which means it's totally counterintuitive. After scrambling around with it for a while, I finally figured out (sort of) what was going on.

Turns out my three blog posts had actually been written, and published. And as a matter of fact, they weren't that bad. It's just that after I signed up and paid my money, I was floating in space without an umbilical cord, as far as Pay Per Post was concerned. Note to Pay per Post -- I don't want a forum to solve these issues. I don't have time. I want clear instructions, and fast answers.

Review Me, which launched in a very noisy fashion about a week ago, also offers bloggers for hire. So I signed up for a site review ($60 level, which I thought would get me something pretty good). Waited a few days. Then guess what? The requested blogger emailed me and said that he was too busy to blog right now, but would I like to contact him after the New Year? He shared his upcoming travel plans with me (four trips between now and the end of the year), and I certainly can see why he'd be pressed for time to do some hack blogging. But guys -- it's not exactly what I want to hear when I've spent my time at your website, signing up for a bit of paid p.r. This is business, and I was annoyed.

The truth-in-blogging issue

Review Me comes across as much more "white hat SEO" than Pay per Post. But are they? They fired a shot at Pay per Post for not letting blog readers know that they were reading a product placement, and bragged that their bloggers would clearly disclose to the reader that they are hacks for hire.

Pay per Post, by contrast, merely encourages their bloggers to show they are shills. How? Through the newly-launched DisclosurePolicy.org, from Pay per Post. In a gem of business school double-speak, Pay per Post announced on October 31 the launch of DisclosurePolicy.org. What does it add up to? They will pay their bloggers $10 to put a link on their blogs leading to the Disclosure Policy, which will, in the fine print, tell the reader: "I'm a hack for hire". What makes me laugh is that Pay per Post makes such an effort to come across as the good guys, claiming that transparency in blogging is something they really, really care about.

But bottom line? Who cares? The media, from movies, to news, to the books we give our kids, are one big fat product placement. No one cares anymore. It's one big, happy commercial pigs' trough. So I say -- forget the "transparency" issue guys. Stop trying to be more "white hat" than the next guy. Focus instead on providing great service, because you are in business to serve other businesses. Get that part right, and you'll do well. Get it wrong, and you can be as transparent as you like, all the way to the bankruptcy court.






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List Local Business Launches

Free Listings For Local Businesses In Vertical Directories

Looking for a quick, easy link for your local business? Try List Local Business, a new network of stand-alone business directories organized into local markets. Almost sixty business categories are presently included in the network, with more in the pipeline.

Bricks And Mortar Presence Is Not Essential

The only requirement for inclusion in a List Local Business directory, besides the need for your business to fit one of the categories, is that the business be local in nature. It is not mandatory that the business have a bricks and mortar office or storefront, but it is necessary that it be local in scope and service area. Your free listing can include name, contact info, link to your website, and description.

Wide Range Of Business Categories Available

The directories include a wide range of businesses, covering niches like plastic surgeons, automotive repair, furniture stores, schools, limousine services, landscaping companies, chiropractors, moving companies, dentists, and so forth. You can find the full list of nearly sixty categories at List Local Business, which is the gateway site to the network.

Search Marketing Benefits of a Listing

For a qualified business, this is a very good deal. There are several benefits to such a listing, including the local advertising it provides, and the direct link back to the business website, which assists in search engine ranking for the site. The fact that the listing appears in a vertical directory, rather than a generalized directory, means that the backlink to the business website is surrounded by similar (in scope) text and links, making it a postive neighborhood for the link to appear in. These are all important considerations for how the link ultimately appears to the search engines.

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Finally, A Big Link Comes Through

Diary of an SEO Campaign

The continuing saga of a site known only as The Site, launched on 8-1-06, as it tries to reach the top 3 slots of Google for its key search term.

Day 87

The Site got a big emotional boost today (well at least I did) when I noticed a huge leap in daily traffic. A quick search of the referrals in the analytics program showed a brand new link from About.com

As you can imagine, it has me dancing in the aisles, so to speak. A link from an authoritative, on-topic site with a page rank of 7, deep-linked into The Site, and a complimentary sentence accompanying the link. And why did I get this? Because I wrote an article with a couple of original thoughts in it. I took a set of data that is already widely-known, and came up with a new way of looking at something.

This was very gratifying to me because I feel very strongly that creating quality content is the only real way to succeed longterm on the Internet. Quality can mean a lot of things -- it can mean quality in how you build and maintain your site, it can mean quality in the goods or services you sell, or it can mean quality in the originality and uniqueness of content that you create -- but it all comes down to quality. I think that in the future, on the web, quality is increasingly going to be the only route for the vast majority of websites to rise above the noise and have an impact in their own neighborhoods.

So, three days short of day 90, The Site gets a big old kiss from About.com and some smaller, but significant links are also starting to show up. Again, largely based on the same article I wrote around the beginning of October. The Site is getting traffic from the long tail, but the key search term that I am seeking results for is still not yet ranked in the top 100 of Google. When it breaks the 100 mark, I'll let you know.

In case you're wondering why I'm keeping this diary -- I hope that when The Site finally reaches its goal -- whether in six months or six years -- this diary will be a blueprint that I, and others interested in search marketing, will be able to look back on, and say aha -- this is how the site got to the top. It will be provide a detailed log of a successful search engine optimization campaign. I'm convinced I can reach the goal, and I hope you come along for the ride.






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Time To Revisit The Internet Marketing Scams Issue?

Back in January of this year, I wrote a post about Internet Marketing Scams. Recently, in my traffic analytics (daily must-reading if you are serious about search engine marketing) I've noticed that once or twice a day someone finds my blog using that term -- internet marketing scam, or online marketing scam, something like that.

It makes me wonder -- is there a growing fear of such sleazy behavior? What's going on? I know that Aaron Wall of SEO Book won a lawsuit recently after he was sued by a company whom he had criticized in his blog for shady tactics. (I hope my small cash contribution to Aarons' cause helped a bit with the costs). But beyond that, I have not seen a particular rise in the flood of scamsters filling my in-box with "get ranked on top of Google now" schemes. Or am I just tuning them out?

I have noticed a proliferation of websites, webmasters, online marketers, and so on, using the hard sell sales technique -- you know the kind of thing: the page that scrolls on and on, the large fonts to EMPHASIZE REALLY IMPORTANT POINTS, the urgent, "time-is-ticking" tone, the appeal to "act now" or forever lose this fantastic offer which will make me become THE ONE to succeed in whatever online business I am engaged in. I tune most of them out, unless they are really, really, REALLY well done (and 95% of them are NOT). But are they scams? Most of them don't really add up to "scams" as such -- just snake oil tactics and advertising hype for mundane, cheesy products that are the equivalent of buying your online marketing gear at the Five and Dime. (That's the first time I've ever used Five and Dime in a post. Kinda cool).

But what is a REAL internet marketing scam? (Hey, this hype stuff is KINDA FUN). If you've had a bad experience with one, drop a comment. If you're running one, definitely drop a comment and tell us all about it. It doesn't have to relate to the search marketing or search engine optimization field -- we take anything here! (Well, almost anything).






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