New web sites and the Google Sandbox

Launching your new web site and playing in the Google Sandbox.

So, at this point in the process of creating your on-line business, you have created an SEO-friendly navigation menu, written great title tags, meta tags and keyword-based, intriguing text content descriptions for all of your products and services. You've worked like crazy getting to this moment, or have paid handsomely to have this work done for you by a professional web designer. The big day has arrived, at last. You launch your website....and nothing happens. You've typed all your keywords into the Google search box. Searched for your business name. You've even typed the complete URLs of your specific pages in and Google's results indicate that your site is nonexistent, as far as they're concerned. At this point you panic and either start searching the Internet for an answer as to why your web site isn't appearing in the Google search results, or you call up your designer, frantically demanding to know what's going on. Unless, of course, I am the one who designed your site, in which case I forewarned you when we started out on the project that it could take anywhere from 2-9 months for your web site to be indexed by Google. This annoying phenomenon resulted in people in the web industry coining the term 'the Google Sandbox'.

What is the Google Sandbox? Does it really exist?

SEO professionals continue to debate the existence of this thing called the Google sandbox. You see, an SEO's whole job is to try to learn as much as he can about the various search engines algorithms (the equations by which the engines determine what's valuable and what isn't). The Big 3 search engines, MSN, Yahoo! and Google all have slightly different algorithms and no one actually knows exactly what they are. We make the best educated guesses we can, based on experience. One thing that has been noticed fairly consistently is that it takes a while for a brand new web site to begin showing up in the search engine results. As I mentioned before, it can take between 2-9 months. Most commonly, we see quality sites waiting for about 2 months before their pages start showing up. The competitiveness of the field a new business is trying to enter appears to be a determining factor in the waiting period. Additionally, we have seen new sites jump right into the index with a couple of weeks if they can start out in the game with a few authority links pointing to them. Whatever the case may be, we always warn new clients about this beforehand, so there are no surprises when the new site is launched.

The interesting thing is that some SEOs feel that the sandbox exists and others state that it absolutely doesn't. For my own part, I do not believe Google actually has a 'sandbox'. I think what we are seeing would be more aptly named a time/trust factor. Because Google is bombarded with spam sites all the livelong day, they have had to come up with a way of filtering out the junk as best as they can. Separating the sheep from the goats, if you will. Their goal is to populate their index with the best quality web pages they can find, and by letting a new site rest in a sort of limbo for a few weeks, they have a better chance of determining whether it's the real deal, or a spam site. But, whatever it is that causes this waiting period to happen, a small web business owner needs to be prepared for it, and needs to be educated about the fact that this hang time is a critical period for what you do with your web site. Call it the sandbox if you like, but don't just sit in it, staring off into space, waiting to be indexed one day. The moment your site is launched, it's time to get to work!

You're going to want to get good at these 2 things, because you're going to continue doing them for the life of your on-line business. The first is content writing. Yes, more content writing. Now that you've got all your products written up nicely, it is time to dig deeper yet and start writing the type of worthy content we described in the last section of this guide. Write content. Write more content. Keep writing...

The second task at hand revolves around getting inbound links to your web site. Inbound means that they are links pointing to your web pages from exterior sources. Google's algorithm currently places tremendous focus on the number and quality of links pointing to a web page. The more links you win from others, and the better those links are, the better your web pages will rank.

It's important for me to devote a paragraph to this subject, as it seems to be an area of great confusion for new small business owners. My clients continue to receive emails entitled "Link Exchange Request". Little by little, I'm training them to delete these. Once upon a time, Google's algorithm enabled websites to boost their rankings via reciprocal linking (I give you a link and you give me one). I'd say this all changed in 2005/2006. The system was being so badly abused that Google swept across the Internet and began devaluing reciprocal links to put a stop to the abuse of the system. Nevertheless, some people still haven't gotten the message on this and continue to pursue reciprocal linking as a valid SEO practice. It just isn't. Though a few reciprocal links won't hurt you, and often, they occur naturally here and there, don't waste your time on this outdated practice.

One-way links are links that point to your site without your website pointing back to the giver of the link. Every one-way link to your site counts as a vote for your website's popularity and value in the eyes of the Googlebot. Some of these links will be completely voluntary if your web content is so good that people link to it because they deem it important. For example, if you had a super article on your website teaching people how to build a birdhouse, step by step, you could potentially win a bunch of one-way links from birdwatchers who like your plans and think others would, too. Beyond the purely voluntary links, there are the one-way links you actively attempt to win from others by writing to them.

Here's an example. Let's say I've just launched a website on the subject of folk clothing. I sell patterns for making neat traditional garments from around the world. After launch, I begin to go around the Internet looking for quality blogs that write about culture, fashion, holidays, sewing, crafting and anything else I can think of that ties in with my subject. I then contact each blog owner with a carefully-crafted email saying why I like their blog, and asking if they might find this pattern I've developed for making a traditional Indian Kameez blog-worthy? Bloggers are constantly looking for neat things to write about...that's what blogging is all about. If my email is compelling enough, I may just win a write-up from the blogger and it will contain a one-way link to my website. That's how this works. It requires LOTS of effort and patience, but truly pays off if you're working towards better rankings.

The recent explosion of Social Media website like Digg, Delicious, Reddit, Magnolia, etc. have opened up a whole new potential world from which a website owner can win valuable links, but this subject falls under the heading of advanced SEO, rather than the basics we're focusing on here. Learn the first steps first, and then, begin learning about how participating in Social Media sites can benefit your small business. It's a brave new world, and it has a learning curve, but offers rich potential rewards.

This is your other option while sitting in the Google 'sandbox' or whatever you want to call it. And, this can be a really helpful move for you to make if you want to start getting sales right off the bat, before your web site begins to rank well naturally in the search engine listings. I must reiterate that this has nothing to do with paid linking services (link farms). DO NOT sign up with these, under any circumstances. Rather, I am talking here about paying to be advertised on popular, high-traffic websites that will allow you to pay to have a text ad on their site for a given fee. Only do this if the web site is a true authority site. For example, if you were in the Home & Garden Industry and could pay for an ad on HGTV's website, that might be a good choice (though costly). It would not serve you to pay to advertise on a small, low-profile site. The second option is to run pay-per-click ads through a program like Google Adwords.

In this program, you create ads which appear on the right hand side of the Google search engine results pages. If someone clicks on your ad, you pay Google, whether a sale results from the click or not. The beauty of this is that, if you've got the budget, you can pay to rank #1 in the paid listings while you are still waiting for your web site to get off the ground and rank well naturally. Even well-established web businesses continue to budget for pay-per-click advertising to highlight sales or special products, or to rank well for a keyword that is just too competitive for them to quickly rank at the top for naturally. The downside of pay-per-click campaigns is that they can be very expensive, and are only worthwhile if you are profiting from them. The most competitive keywords cost the most to rank at the top for in the paid listings. A web site owner may be paying anywhere from a few cents to several dollars per click, depending upon the competitiveness of the keyword. Google Adwords allows you to research how much each keyword phrase will cost before you create the ad, and they indicate how many clicks you are likely to get each day so that you can set a daily budget that you are willing to expend on having your ad shown by them. You've got to do the math here. If you sell rocking chairs and each chair costs $30, and you have to spend $55 a month to rank in the top 3 positions for your ad for rocking chairs, you know that at least 2 clicks per month will need to result in a sale for you to be profiting from your ads. Any sales beyond that will be, as they say, pure gravy!

A last important note on Paid Links

Google has been confusing webmasters during the past year with their position on paid links. Their Adwords program is a paid link program, and yet, they have come out and said that websites caught buying links may be penalized. What are they talking about?

Basically, what Google wants is for paid links to look like advertisements. They don't want them to look like one-way, voluntary links that vote for the quality of a website. This has made people very angry. Many large companies spend thousands of dollars a year to have their paid links placed by textlink brokers on high quality websites. While Google doesn't object to traffic being obtained via such links, they do object to these links passing 'juice' (also called PageRank) on to the website being linked to thereby causing rankings to rise. Google wants people to clearly label paid links as being paid for, but people are rebelling against this request, continuing to buy links under the radar, and hoping they don't get caught and penalized.

Many small businesses are not going to have the budget to buy these types of links in the first place, but some will, and I would suggest doing thorough research into this complex topic before deciding whether or not you will take the risk of buying paid links through a broker.

In the final section of this SEO guide, I would like to highlight the issues you should consider when it comes to doing all of the above on your own, or hiring a professional to help you.

Next: Go it alone or hire a pro for web design and SEO.

Return to the SEO Guide Outline.