A lot has been written about the Google Sandbox effect, but much of it is based on early reports of what webmasters thought was a downgrading of a site that was just beginning to do well.

Many webmasters concluded from this drop that Google was giving their new sites some good rankings so other webmasters could find their content to link to it and then after a short period of good rankings for being a new site the rankings drop.

The theory was if the content was great that short period of good rankings would be enough to generate enough backlinks to give it a start on the journey to long term rankings in Google.

As you’ll see after reading this article the drop in rankings was not as these webmasters first thought, but the side effect of a new Google algorithm, they were unlucky to have new sites at the wrong time.

For starters lets determine what’s normal Google ups and downs in SERPs and what’s actually being in the sandbox.

What’s NOT the Google Sandbox Effect?

If you’ve got a new site and after a few months from going live your seeing a steady 40 visitors a day from Google and then it drops to 20 visitors a day, this is not the Google sandbox effect.

A drop from 40 to 20 visitors a day is not a big drop, you probably lost SERPs, (very easy to do with a new site) happens all the time, (you don’t notice it as much when you have 1,000+ visitors a day).

You’ve got an old site that’s ranked well for years and it suddenly looses Google traffic for no obvious reason, this again is not the Google sandbox effect, Google has either changed it’s algorithm (AGAIN!) and you’ve been hit bad or something else has gone wrong (maybe you lost some important backlinks).

Is Your Site in the Google Sandbox?

You have a sandboxed site when you have a relatively new site or an old site that’s never gained quality links (low PR) and despite adding enough links to rank well for several months (these are quality links and enough to give a PR5 home page, PR4 for easier niches) and having good on page optimization the sites rankings for semi-competitive SERPs are barely moving (feel like they are stuck in the sand).

If someone wants to jump in and say, but my new site was ranking really well after a couple of weeks then dropped like a stone, please post your traffic details, because I can practically guarantee your going to come out with low visitor numbers and that does not = the start of a well ranked site.

Has anyone recently started a site from scratch (newly registered domain, no backlinks) and in under 3 months got it to over 1,000 unique visitors a day from Google?

I used to be able to do this with ease, now it’s damn hard and needs sites with several thousand pages of unique content: basically each page pulls in a visitor or two a day, (if your lucky and in a high traffic niche) not a single semi-competitive SERP amongst them, so if this was a 20 page site you’d be seeing ~20 visitors a day, 1,000 page site ~1,000 visitors a day (so your gaining traffic through quantity of content and very easy SERPs, not a small number of well ranked pages).

So What is The Google Sandbox?

All sites start in what has been called the Google Sandbox, unfortunately there’s a lot of misinformation about what it is.

I have created and worked on over 400 domains some before and many after and a handful during the time this effect came to light. So I have a lot of data on how new sites rank in Google.

I have rarely seen what was originally called the sandbox effect:

Newish site (not to big, so not thousands of pages) started to get good rankings (meaning some semi-competitive SERPs = decent traffic numbers, in the hundreds not tens of visitors a day) then wham, traffic drops to barely anything (under 50 visitors a day) and takes months before it starts climbing again.

That was the original description of the sandbox and many webmasters got hit with this traffic drop when this effect was coming to light, but I’ve not seen this since.

What I am sure has happened is Google changed the way links passed benefit and the sites that was just beginning to do well in the old algorithm dropped like a stone in the new algorithm.

It’s analogous to having a sloping beach and when your out the sea (above the tide line) your doing well, in the water your not.

Before the time of the sandbox effect being reported by thousands of webmasters the tide was low, Google made an algorithm change and not only did the tide rise, but the beach front moved a few hundred feet inland swamping sites that had just started to do well.

Since the tide never went back out new sites that are in the ’sea’ have much further to climb up the beach before they reach dry land.

That’s not a bad analogy and fits in with the sandbox: sand, sea etc…

Before the change with a strong links campaign you could get a brand new site ranked for semi-competitive SERPs in 3-6 months.

For example I had a site banned (I used to use blackhat SEO techniques) before the sandbox (was getting 8,000 unique visitors a day in a money niche, loosing that site taught me a valuable lesson I’ll tell you!), made a similar site and within 4 months was close to 3,000 unique visitors a day (that doesn’t happen now).

When I use the same SEO techniques today it will take about a year to gain that sort of success due to what the sandbox really is. So what took 3 months to achieve pre sandbox Google algorithm now takes 9+ months post sandbox Google algorithm.

One way of looking at this is new links do not pass full benefit right away, there’s a dampening effect on new links. Before the sandbox effect the link benefit dampening factor lasted around 3 months, but now it’s around 9 months.

I believe Google made this change to combat comment link spammers, at the time of the change link spamming was rampant (and it worked), since comment links on blogs and forums tend to drop deep into the archived pages (usually low PR pages long term) after a month or two the benefit passed from links from popular blogs are not going to effect Google rankings as much if they don’t pass full benefit until they are deeply archived.

How To Climb Out The Sandbox

There’s only one guaranteed way out of the sandbox for a new site and that’s a good links campaign and patience.

Whatever links you add today will not pass full link benefit until around 9 months from now (used to be about 3 months). Unfortunately this means for most new sites to rank well your going to have to wait about a year, since it takes time to gain links to a new site.

Most important thing is to remember the links are growing in power, but not enough to help until around 9 months, so don’t think the sites failed and give up or do something stupid like trying blackhat SEO techniques in desperation.

Keep working on your content and on new backlinks and be confident your site will rank well long term if you’ve got the backlinks and reasonable on page SEO.

Can the Google Sandbox be Avoided?

The sandbox can not be avoided for a new site, but since what we are waiting for is links to age if you can buy an old site with aged backlinks and a reasonable PR home page (PR5 ideally, PR4 minimum) you could cut the waiting period between adding your content to good rankings from at least 9 months to potentially over night** with the right site.

** It would be over night for easy SERPs and some semi-competitive SERPs, but even if you bought a site with a PR6 home page since there’s the anchor text of incoming links to a page is important to that pages rankings, your going to be lacking that targeted anchor text.

If you bought a PR6 home page site about “Sandboxes for Children” and wanted it to rank well for “Cheap Mortgages” all the anchor text of the current backlinks will be about Sandboxes and not Cheap Mortgages, so there will be no anchor text supporting the new contents SERPs.

I’d estimate this sort of content change will loose around 30% of an aged sites ranking benefit, still much, much better than starting with a newly registered domain, but not as good as having those links using the right anchor text.

Fortunately internal links anchor text is just as good as anchor text from external links, so if you optimise your internal links you can at least benefit from the link benefit flowing through the site.

Since this link benefit is from aged links your internal links pass full link benefit from day one (there’s no link benefit dampening effect on internal links).

David Law (SEO Consultant)

Interesting title don’t you think

No I’ve not lost the plot, all will become clear as you read.

The World of Warcraft

Recently I’ve become a little addicted to the Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) The World of Warcraft (WOW).

My eldest son (15 years old) is to blame, he wanted to try the game out to make some money, so I bought the game and paid for a 6 month subscription, but after I played it I was hooked (it’s so addictive)!!

Now we have two World of Warcraft accounts!

Originally he planned to sell WOW gold (apparently a big industry, but against the terms of playing WOW), but changed his mind and settled on creating the site Warcraft World which is primarily a list of World of Warcraft Quest Guides.

The World of Warcraft Leveling Ebook

Earlier this month my son told me about an Ebook “Joana’s 1-70 World of Warcraft Horde leveling Guide” that promises to power level your WOW Horde characters from 1-60 in 4 days and 20hrs (which is very fast) and 60-70 just as fast (so a fast 1-70 WOW leveling guide).

Unfortunately the sales page for this Ebook uses the scam like marketing technique (bold fonts, buy now and you’ll pull hot women with a single look sort of thing ) so I didn’t immediately buy a copy of the guide, (that marketing technique really puts me off, click the Ebook image to the right to see his sales page!) but did manage to see a printed copy (the leveling guide is really an online Ebook with links to quest guides) for a few days from another local World of Warcraft Player (apparently 8 million people play this online game!!!).

Turned out this Ebook was very good so I bought us a copy, and we both started to follow the leveling instructions within. We began to level much faster (several times faster) than before.

Affiliate Marketing Opportunity

We also saw an affiliate marketing opportunity since the author Joana/Madcow sells the 1-70 leveling Guide via Clickbank with a 50% revenue share, (affiliates make over $15 a sale) it made sense to join the affiliate program. With my SEO knowledge and network of sites and my sons ermmm… (will add something he can do later ) we could grab a fair chunk of a small, but lucrative niche market.

So we both wrote honest reviews of the leveling guide with affiliate links for those looking to purchase:-

My Joana’s 1-70 World of Warcraft Horde leveling Guide Review

My sons WOW Joana’s 1-70 Horde leveling Guide Review

Finally Some SEO Information

My son wrote his review first and used WOW in the title, so I used World of Warcraft for my title, the idea being he’d be more likely to gain WOW SERPs and I’d be more likely to gain World of Warcraft SERPs (title contents is very important).

The pages haven’t been live long and though my review is better optimised, covering many more terms than my sons (I’m teaching him SEO, but it takes time and he’s a teenager!) if all other things were equal you’d expect the dedicated World of Warcraft site to beat my Make Money Online Guide site which prior to the review had NO other pages about WOW (now a few supporting pages). Basically my site had no WOW/World of Warcraft optimisation and my sons had plenty (menu links, logo area etc… all shout World of Warcraft).

Despite this my site is doing better in the World of Warcraft/WOW SERPs and is making more affiliate sales!

Aged Text Links and High Google Rankings

My site was first registered 21-Aug-2001, though I bought it at auction almost 2 years ago and started using it in March 2006 (so just over a year ago). I’ve not gone over the top in text link terms (could add thousands of text links from my network) so the home page is a modest PR4.

My sons site was registered 24-Feb-2007, (new registration) and he started to use it straight away. Currently a low PR3, but I’ve added some links that should take it to at least PR4 next PR update.

So my site could be considered to be just over 1 year old (use time) and my sons site just 3 months old. In PR terms I think the home pages will be very similar at the next PR update, possibly with the World of Warcraft site having a higher PR (added some nice PR links). And yet my site that’s got little to do with WOW is gaining more relevant traffic than the relevant site is!

The reason for this is the aged links. Google delays link benefit (or full PR benefit) for a period of time (at least 9 months), this is what some call the Google Sandbox effect. So right now there’s hardly any PR/link benefit counting on the World of Warcraft site and the majority of the PR/link benefit is counting on the year plus old More Earnings site.

Long term (6-9 months from now) I expect the true World of Warcraft site to be above my page for the vast majority of the Warcraft Ebook SERPs because then all that PR/link benefit will count fully.

So if you create a new site and find it’s not doing well despite adding enough links give it some time for all that PR/link benefit to be fully counted.

You have to be very patient when waiting for Google rankings these days!

Can a blackhat SEO consultant ever go too far?

I think that was answered earlier today when the Google employee Matt Cutts SEO blog was hacked by the owner of a blackhat SEO blog.

Whitehat SEO Turns to the Dark side!

In a moment of madness the whitehat of Matt Cutts was temporarily tossed aside as he recipricated in kind and hacked the blackhat’s SEO blog

Obviously that’s not what really happened. A hackers had some fun with two site owners.

I’m sure Matt and Dark SEO Team will fix their sites quite quickly, so I took screenshots for prosperity

Text on the page:

This site have been hacked by
Dark SEO Team.
nous sommes le proprietaire de toi

Shoutz to Dan “the man”, the 302 hijack t33m, NYC SEO gang, Linusx, pentazilla, daxster, boogybonmot, Earl+Duke, davenator, cRWc, monkeyboy, the canadian crew::J&T,
spamhuntress, LB, jb, NW, -eng, U(r|d)(s|i), L/S, Z-man, scbl, RandomFish, huZZah, chivesmack, Shchoeoe+npMMo, lejackalgris, theGUY to GoTo, phenssen, Romanian Brothers and all the FORUMS!!

In BLACK SEO’in We TrUsT!!!

.:: Dark SEO Team ::. (link back Dark SEO Team blog)

Despite the illegal nature of hacking it is very funny. Matts SEO blog now link to the home page of Dark SEO Team which has also being hacked!

Screenshot below:

The text is quite funny-

Defaced by Matt ! I ownz you, Dark seo team

Of course I’m lying when I make everyone believe that content is King.

Of course black hat SEO and spamdexing are the only Kings.
Google is just a stupid algorithm relying on spammy backlinks.
But you guys had no right to let everyone know. That’s why I defaced your bloody DST site. To show the entire world how evil a white hat can be.

In fact, I’m as evil as my employer

All your backlinks are belong to us !

**Head of the Google’s Webspam team** (link back to Matt’s SEO Blog)

If the hackers read this I think you rule, so don’t hack my sites

There’s quite a bit of confusion over 301 redirects and how they effect SEO and a sites rankings. We’ve extensively used permanent 301 redirects on both our own and client sites and in this article I’ll explain how to use them and what you should expect SEO wise.

First some basic information for those new to permanent redirects.

What is a permanent 301 Redirect

A 301 or permanent redirect basically tells a browser (or search engine spider) that the site or page it is accessing has moved permanently. It then immediately redirects that page to the new one.

Search engines like Google will attempt to pass SEO benefit (PR and anchor text benefits) from the old page to the new page.

How to Setup a 301 Redirect Within your .htaccess File

There’s several ways to setup a 301 redirect, probably the easiest is via your .htaccess file since it doesn’t require access to the server, just FTP access. The .htaccess file is a text file that you add to your site to store site and even directory specific server information (you can have a .htaccess file for every directory or just one for the whole site). Basically it adds to or overrides the current server settings.

If you have trouble creating a .htaccess file (some text editors won’t create a file named .htaccess) download this example one below (or one of the others later) and edit to your needs.

Example .htaccess file (all the code mentioned in this article)

A Simple 301 Redirect

A simple 301 redirect that redirects an old page to a new page for example to redirect www.seo-consultant-services.co.uk/old-seo.htm to www.seo-consultant-services.co.uk/new-seo.php do the following.

Open your .htaccess file in a text editor (like Notepad) and add the following code:

RewriteEngine On
Redirect 301 /old-seo.htm http://www.seo-consultant-services.co.uk/new-seo.php

Or download this .htaccess file and edit to your needs.

The first part (RewriteEngine On) might not be needed, but just in case it’s turned off on your server add it (only needs to be added once per .htaccess file).

Save the file and upload the .htaccess file to the root of the domain that hosts the old page: “root of domain” means if you wanted to load it with a browser it would be found at http://www.seo-consultant-services.co.uk/.htaccess

Now when accessing http://www.seo-consultant-services.co.uk/old-seo.htm it will immediately redirect to http://www.seo-consultant-services.co.uk/new-seo.php and Google etc… should pass any link benefit (PR and anchor text benefits) to the new page.

Be patient since it takes time for Google etc… to re-index the page and pass benefit to the new page, during this period (usually within 6 weeks) you may see a drop in SERPs, but it should be temporary.

You can use the same procedure above to redirect to another site, if we added the following to your .htaccess file on www.seo-consultant-services.co.uk

RewriteEngine On
Redirect 301 /old-seo.htm http://www.seo-gold.com/new-seo.php

or the code below to use the same file name as the old site-

RewriteEngine On
Redirect 301 /old-seo.htm http://www.seo-gold.com/old-seo.htm

When we load www.seo-consultant-services.co.uk/old-seo.htm it will redirect to www.seo-gold.com/new-seo.php or www.seo-gold.com/old-seo.htm respectively.

Download this .htaccess file and edit to your needs.

Now you know how to setup a simple 301 redirect one page at a time for varying effects.

301 Redirects and www/non-www Canonical Issues

There’s two ways to view most sites, that’s the www and non-www version. I won’t go into the full history of www (mainly because I don’t know it in detail), it’s enough to know when the first websites went online they were put in the folder www on the server (World Wide Web) and to access them you had to use the URL structure www.domain.com and it basically became the standard way to access a site via a browser. But, it’s not the only way, the true ‘location’ of the files are under domain.com (the www is in fact a sub-domain, you can have a completely separate site at www).

This has led to problems with search engines like Google indexing both versions resulting in duplicate content and sharing link benefit problems. Some webmasters link to the www version and others the non-www, search engine spiders follow the links and spider the site twice.

The major search engines have the ability to determine the www and non-www versions are the same and combine the results (passing all the benefit to just one version), but occasionally it fails and we see both versions indexed, we call this a www/non-www canonical issue. This is bad for the site owner since link benefit (PR/anchor text) is shared over two sites (making it harder to gain competitive SERPs).

To check if you have a www/non-www canonical issue perform a site: search in Google-

site:http://domain.tld

The above search will find all pages indexed under the domain including the www and non-www versions. If you have a small site look through what is indexed, if you find both www and non-www pages indexed you have a canonical problem.

For larger sites the next search will only find the www version-

site:http://www.domain.tld

If there’s differences you might have a canonical problem. To be safe use the .htaccess code listed below as then you’ll never have to worry about www and non-www canonical problems again.

301 Redirects Fixes the www/non-www Canonical Issue

Fortunately a small amount of code within your .htaccess file located at root can solve the canonical problem. What this code does is 301 redirect one form of the site to the other, it’s like you setup an unlimited number of the simple 301 redirects I listed earlier on the fly.

If you use the www version use this code

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.seo-consultant-services\.co.uk$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.seo-consultant-services.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

The code above will 301 redirect the non-www version to the www version. Obviously replace seo-consultant-services and co.uk with your domain name/tld.

Download the 301 redirect code in a pre-made .htaccess file and edit to your needs.

If you use the non-www version use this code

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^seo-consultant-services\.co.uk$
RewriteRule (.*) http://seo-consultant-services.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

The code above will 301 redirect the www version to the non-www version. Obviously replace seo-consultant-services and co.uk with your domain name/tld.

Download the 301 redirect code in a pre-made .htaccess file and edit to your needs.

More Complex Permanent 301 Redirects

The above 301 permanent redirects cover most situations you’ll come across, below I’ll post a couple of detailed permanent redirects for when you want to change domain names for an existing site whilst avoiding any www and non-www canonical problems.

www version

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.seo-gold\.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.seo-consultant-services.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^seo-gold\.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.seo-consultant-services.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

The code above will 301 redirect both the www and non-www version of seo-gold.com (the old domain) to the WWW version of seo-consultant-services.co.uk (the new domain). Add this .htaccess file to the OLD site and upload the files from the old site to the new to see a seamless switch from an old domain to a new one.

Non-www version

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^seo-gold\.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://seo-consultant-services.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.seo-gold\.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://seo-consultant-services.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

The code above will 301 redirect both the www and non-www version of seo-gold.com (the old domain) to the non-www version of seo-consultant-services.co.uk (the new domain). Add this .htaccess file to the OLD site and upload the files from the old site to the new to see a seamless switch from an old domain to a new one.

Expect some temporary (under 6 weeks) SERPs drops as Google etc… take the new 301 redirects into account.

Download both versions of the code above in a pre-made .htaccess file and edit to your needs.

Don’t forget when moving domains you should also add a .htaccess file that deals with canonical problems to the new domain (the code under the heading “301 Redirects Fixes the www/non-www Canonical Issue”).

This article should cover the vast majority of scenarios requiring 301 redirects.

It’s that time of year again when Google invites college and university students to work on open source projects, see Now Accepting Student Applications for Google Summer of Code 2007 for how to apply etc…

WordPress (the CMS used for this site) is participating in Google’s Summer of Code and until the 24th March are open to ideas from users etc… for project ideas.

Will be interesting to see what they come up with.

What I’d like to see is-

1. The image/link bug fixed. When you post an image as a link WordPress forgets to add the closing link tag (/a). At least not fixed in WordPress 2.0.4 (can’t use latest version, need to update the server to run it).

2. The ability to split up large posts into multiple pages without the need for using the nextpage tag and so WordPress splits the post into multiple database entries. To expand on this I was working on a project to use public domain books within WordPress, post an entire book and have it automatically split the book into multiple pages. Got it working except the automated bit (had to create a PHP script that added the nextpage tag every X characters) and then realised though WordPress will break the book into pages (as wanted) it did so by pulling the entire book from the database for every page!! This meant if you had a 1MB book rather than page one being 5KB or something download from the database it was the entire 1MB, same for page 2 (entire 1MB), page 3 (entire 1MB) etc… so had to abandon the project using WordPress because of this. A shame as WordPress is so easy to work with.

If I think of anything else will post here