Google Marketing - How to avoid new site frustrations

Many small business site owners will be aware of the phenomenon known as the "Google Sandbox Effect". When you upload a brand new site to the Internet, you'd hope to be picked up by Google and ranked well for your favourite keywords. In practice, this simply doesn't happen. Google's complex and secret algorithms have been finely tuned to prevent new entrants to the web from surging straight to the top of the engine rankings.

New sites have to undergo a kind of probationary period, where pages are indexed by Google, but will rarely feature highly for targeted search terms. This is a quite deliberate attempt to prevent "fly by night" and other spammers from creating larger numbers of new sites which would litter key search terms on the web.

Google rewards authority sites - these are sites which have been around for a while, provide regularly updated and relevant content, and those which receive "votes" (links) from other respected sites in a similar industry.

It is quite clear that site/domain name longevity is a key factor for Google - sites which have been around for a period of time definitely pick up more points in the Google algorithm (assuming they're also doing the basics right).

The Bytestart team has set up dozens of sites over the past 8 years, and we can say with some certainty that domain age is a significant factor in Google's search engine ranking algorithm.

This site, for example, is 2 years and 3 months old. For the first 9 months, Google indexed our pages, but didn't rank any of them for our target keywords. After this probationary period (The Sandbox) was over, our traffic quadrupled overnight.

Traffic has grown month-on-month ever since. Of course, we are adding new content all the time, but our targeted keyword phrases have also climbed the Top 10 rankings over time with no particular search engine optimisation effort involved. Once again, the longer a site is online, and gaining links at a regular basis, the more Google will regard it as "important".

Our experience, and that of many other site owners, provides a problem for new entrants on the web. Not only do new sites have to put up with the initial "sandbox" experience, but they also have to operate consistently over a matter of years before they can compete with older, more respected sites in the same industry.

So, what can new sites do to overcome Google's ageing delay?

Here are some tips to minimise the pain of new entrants -

1) Register your domain right away - Even if you're unsure whether you've picked the best domain, a .co.uk name can cost under £10 for 2 years. Some experts suggest that you buy a domain for as long a time period as possible (e.g. 10 years for a .com) - this may suggest that the site owner is serious, whereas a "fly by night" site owner would probably just purchase a domain for a single year before moving on to the next site.

2) Buy Web Hosting - Connect your domain to some hosting and make the site live as soon as possible, which will minimise the time you'll spend in the Google Sandbox. Again, go for low cost hosting - you can always upgrade to a new host at a later stage.

3) Maintain Good Web Marketing Practice - Build up healthy external links to your new site, write some relevant content, and whatever you do, don't spam or over optimise your code. Good, well crafted sites will get rewarded in the end, you don't need to employ dubious SEO techniques to achieve solid search engine rankings.

4) Patience - Probably the most important tip. It's easy to lose heart if your site has barely registered on Google after 6 months or so - this has happened to the Bytestart team many times in the past. As long as you're adding decent content to the site and exchanging quality links, your site will be recognised in the end. Try to run a new site as if it were already established, and the visitors will come.

5) Buy an existing site - Possibly an obvious solution to the "sandbox" and "ageing delay" problem. Existing sites are bound to cost more than a brand new one, but if you find one which suits, you can just get on with business without concerning yourself with the frustrations most new entrants have to face.