Restricted Growth for New Websites

American specialists in Search Engine Marketing have been analysing a phenomenon known as the 'Google Sandbox' over the last few months.

The sandbox (UK translation: sandpit) is a safe-play area where Google now seems to consign any new website for 6-8 months before they are prepared to include it in normal natural listings.

This effectively prevents a new website obtaining significant immediate free traffic from Google.  It is designed to discourage the 'quick fix' search engine optimiser who may use methods of which Google disapproves to try and win search traffic that otherwise the site would not justify.  It is a new tactic in the war between Google, and other search engines, and those who try to get high rankings by tweaking sites to adapt to the search algorithms rather than promoting real content improvement.

This is clearly bad news for website owners wanting immediate results. But any strategy that improves the real worth of search engine results should be welcomed by all who want to develop a long term strategy and aim to justify a good ranking by the quality of the site they offer.

Presumable during the time the new site is in the sandbox, the Google spider will be regularly monitoring the site activity and development.  This is one more reason to plan regular updates and improvements rather than intermittent radical change. There is now a danger that such radical change might cause Google to treat the site as new with the consequence that the immediate effect would be to lose traffic even though in the longer term there would be clear gain.

The short term solution to increasing visitor numbers is cost-per-click advertising. Using that effectively also enables you to test the effectiveness of the site in converting visitors to clients.  That will in turn lead to new ideas for site improvement which, at some point, will lead to higher positions in the natural rankings for free.

The ideal solution for search engines and serious marketers - a virtuous circle!

Talk to you next month,

Regards

Stephen Orr