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And.. what do I need to be carfull of in cross linking domains?
Thanks for the help!
My own take is that the age of the site is not relevant. Its the age of the links that count.
Getting found & indexed by G is not the problem. Getting traffic is.
Lots of good pros experiencing this AFAIK
J
Nobody seems to be able to define that exactly. GG tells people they should not be greedy with their links, but when they get penalized he tells them they shouldn't have created links to bad neighbors. So now everyone has a fear of linking to their own domains. So the only safe link would appear to be a link that you do not own, but who knows.
2 - Get 10+ links from relevant sites you do not control
3 - (At present) wait 2-3 months (or longer?) & use this time to build up as many inbound relevant links as possible.
I could be wrong, but this seems to be the Google algo crack at the moment ;)
More experienced people than me have suggested elsewhere that the "Sandbox" is G's treatment of new sites whereby you need to wait a certain length of time before your site starts to get "credit" for the value of the inbound links the site has.
Possibly due to filtering out spam / reducing attractiveness of buying high PageRank links / encourage new sites to spend on Adwords. I think its designed for the first 2 and the Adwords factor is an accidental but welcome coincidence.
J
If you want to know how long it takes to get a decent ranking and some traffic this is an entirely different question and one that no one on this forum can answer with any degree of certainty. Anyone care to shoot me down on this one? (Pleeease!)
If your startpage has decent indexable content, then you can start getting some hits before google has even visited any of your other pages.
Disclaimer:- YMMV.
If your startpage has decent indexable content, then you can start getting some hits before google has even visited any of your other pages.
If only ...
I realise that you used the words "can" and "some" but we should be clear that it now requires much more than indexable content to get any hits from Google. The Google guidelines are easy to follow and follow them I did but my site is virtually nowhere to be found.
I provide many pages of original information on my site and I wrote the material myself. It appears near the top of the other main directories and just about all of the authority sites in my business link to it. Result? I get NO Google traffic and my site cannot be found.
There is just no way that my site should not be getting found for the many keywords used in my business. When I say that I am getting no traffic I mean NO traffic.
I know from the feedback I get from my visitors that the independent information provided on my site is exactly what they are seeking when they search for the main KW. There is definitely some kind of filter placing my site low down in the rankings.
Here's what their technology overview page says ...
The software behind Google's search technology conducts a series of simultaneous calculations requiring only a fraction of a second. Traditional search engines rely heavily on how often a word appears on a web page. Google uses PageRank to examine the entire link structure of the web and determine which pages are most important. It then conducts hypertext-matching analysis to determine which pages are relevant to the specific search being conducted. By combining overall importance and query-specific relevance, Google is able to put the most relevant and reliable results first.
Sorry Google, not in my experience!
There is a post somewhere about the "sandbox effect" - about 300 posts from memory.
The usual pattern seems to be normal spidering of pages, pages appear in the index, PR follows... and then nothing. No rankings, almost zero traffic ....zip.
It would seem there are 2 possibilites:
1) there is a quarantine/intentional delay on new sites....OR
2) some very experienced webmasters have become incompetent overnight.
This forces new websites to wait an unspecified amount of time before gaining rank on the SERP's. Many desperate website owners will be forced to use Adwords to combat the problem. Fairly convenient, wouldn't you say? Not to mention it will come as discouraging to many website owners who won't even make the efforts to gain rank in the SERPs.
I'd love to believe this "sandbox effect" is for gaining better search results, but I doubt it is true. There are many more options for weeding out spam then this that Google could have implemented.
If you think these are the reasons then fine. But apart from that Iīm pretty sure we did everything right. But we are still playing in the sandbox.
I have launched several sites this year in competitive areas. The oldest site is more than 4 months old now, received a PR6 but still suffers from being sandboxed.
I am slowly loosing confidence. Will they ever rank "normal" or is it just gonna stay this way forever?
(P.S. Excuse my ignorance, I know what the sandbox effect is but just what is a sandbox?)
about to get try and get another one up and running so i hope you guys arent right!
just 2 links in from government sites
This is not JUST two links. Links from government sites are almost certainly the reason you are ranking. Get me an inbound link from Google and my troubles would be over.
1) Nope, G! is indexing and ranking as it should.
2) The world changes and some folks don't.
There isn't a problem with G!, per se, the rules change all the time, we are just seeing a slightly different set of rules at play that will affect a few sites.
Read again what I said in message 15. This is not the same as natural fluctuations in the results, which we all must accept. This is something different, which basically wipes sites off the map even though they are still in the index and retaining their PR. Many of the sites that appear 100s of places above mine are off topic, including the one at the top.
There can only be one reason why my site, which conforms to all Google's guidelines, is not being found and that is because it is being actively filtered. I am not saying that it has been singled out. It is one of many sites that are suffering from the same treatment for whatever algorithmic reason.
I know much more about my business than Google and if my site is not ranking then Google is at fault, not my site.
Is your site is indexed? If yes, then there is not a problem with indexing.
You rank low in SERPs? That is nothing to do with indexing new sites. That is a totally different issue.
I would guess you are simply suffering from the changes to the algo that happened last November. Nothing new about that, it happened six months ago and several sites/owners didn't even notice for a while.
Google is indexing new sites as normal. Whether they rank high in SERPs is a totally different subject. That depends on many factors and the quality of the site, as perceived by the owner, has absolutely nothing to do with it.
There is no reason why a new site can't rank high for relatively competitive terms today. To get a new site to rank high for very competitive terms (10K+ visitors per day) immediately is very difficult, but not as difficult as it once was!
I am in a specialist field where 100 hits per day is to die for. I was achieving this until November 15th because my site has links from all the authority sites in this field. I now get 20 hits per day!
Because I am in a small market I know the value of my site and it was probably the most popular in this field. Since November it lost more ground and its PR5 disappeared. This has since come back but I still get no traffic from Google.
I have almost 100 PR4+ inbound links and a DMOZ entry. Believe me when I tell you that my site is not in its deserved position. (Virtually all the traffic that I get comes from these links, which proves their relevance.)
This a relatively small market and I will repeat that there are sites more than 200 places above me that are totally off topic including one in the top ten that promotes spam and porn. On some keywords my website design site actually appears above me because it links to me. What is all that about?
Something is definitely filtering my site and no one will convince me otherwise. I provide about 98% non-commercial content. All I sell is a couple of documents that I wrote and an evaluation spreadsheet. The site is basically a goodwill generator and I hope that by providing free information on my subject I can gain some clients.
Now to get closer to the topic, I published a site in March that was built strictly within Google's current guidelines. I submitted it and it duly appeared in the index. A couple of weeks later it appeared with what I would have said were fair rankings. It stayed there for less than one day then completely disappeared. It is has not been found since. This to me looks like the sandbox effect discussed earlier. I stress the fact that it was built to Google guidelines.
I have noticed a definite decline in the progress getting a new site ranking well in Google this last year.
Up till reading this thread I thought it was totally because ODP is taking 6 months to a year to list new sites and thus these sites can't get into the Google directory and thus the snails pace of getting a good rank in Google. But maybe there are other issues related to this problem.
It has been my major goal to get at least 4 good PR links to each site but according to this thread apparently I need to stretch for 10 and those sites that have over 10 are doing fairly well.
The new sites I designed since the summer of last year were listed in Google within 10 days but are still not in ODP and I still assume that is a big part of the problem.
One of the sites I managed did better than the other new sites but I put in an extensive effort in getting backlinks to this site and the owner of the site helps with this also. The problem is the backlinks come and go every month--which I assume is because Google is rearranging the way they accept backlinks so it's a constant struggle.
Most of the sites I manage I've redesigned and I've noticed it takes quite a while for Google to quit listing the old site and accept the new domain instead even when I remove all content from the old site and put up a redirect to the new so my analysis of this situation is hampered by this plus the ODP problem.
Also, I have a different problem than others on this thread with my own site which gets about 99% Google visitors and very little from the other engines and this has me concerned, so I need to focus on those in case anything Google changes its method of recording PR (I've done a lot of internal linking to inside pages and other sites of mine under the same domain which, according to this thread could be a problem eventually).
I keep original, constantly changing info on my site and I suspect that is why it is doing so well and I encourage my clients to do this also--but very few of them take this seriously. I'm also linking to other sites from inside pages now and not so much on my link page which I heard Google is discounting.
If it wasn't for forums like WebmasterWorld we web designers wouldn't know what's going on and how to keep up with all these changes.
Lorel
I launched a new site in March and linked to it from a PR6 site of mine. The home page was indexed within 2 days, all 100 pages were in the index within 2 weeks. However, none of the pages rank in the top 200 for ANY of their terms.
So I put a near-identical site on a free web host. I was careful to avoid duplicate content, but kw density, incoming links etc were exactly the same and again, I linked to it from my PR6 site.
Initially, same results - home page indexed within 2 days, all 100 pages in the index within 2 weeks, but significantly EVERY page was ranking well in the serps and I am still riding high with my 'free host' site a month later. Meanwhile my original 2 month old site with its new domain is nowhere.
If this doesn't back up the sandbox theory I don't know what does. :)
PS - I should also add my underperforming new site is on a different IP address to my PR6 site with which I link to it.
