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SEO Help - Readers Write

August 02nd, 2007 | Category: Entrepreneurship, Internet Marketing

This week one of our readers, Taz, the 25 year old owner of http://www.beardcareproducts.com, wrote in looking for help with his website rankings:

Hi Evan,

I’m glad I found your site…we started an online business called www.beardcareproducts.com and were ranking pretty high and then suddenly dropped way, way down. We are still in the index, so I hope we can regain our position by implementing some of your suggestions. I’m 25 so still a YE!

You probably get a lot of inquiries so if its possible could you let me know what might have affected my site’s rankings? We only started June 13th, 2007…and haven’t violated guidelines. I haved used keywords appropriately and recently reduced the density just in case that was having an effect. In Webmaster tools, I’m still in the index…but don’t know why I lost my rankings…any help in this regard would be appreciated.

I asked Taz for more details…

Hi Evan,

Thanks for the help, I really appreciate it. I noticed that the ranks I had on Google are still retained on MSN almost exactly. Here are the Keywords & Former Positions on Google:
Beard Lotion #1
Beard Care Products #1
Beard Care #2
Beard Grooming #5
Beard Shampoo #7

Even if I put beardcareproducts.com (my url) into Google, I still rank below a site that links to me. I signed up for Google’s Webmaster Central and there are no crawl errors. I lost my rankings around July 27th. Site has been online since June 13th, so a little over a month.

Kind Regards,
Taz

I hate to be the bearer of bad news and let a fellow internet entrepreneur down but it will hard to get the rankings back quickly. I have noticed two distinct trends that often occur with brand new websites:

1) They get sandboxed and do not get any recognition by Google. The more spammy the industry tends to be the longer you can get sandboxed. For example, a friend of mine launched a blog offering practical money savings tips for every day life (a great read) but because there are so many fake sites in this industry, his site is still in the sandbox after being around for six months and having quality sites link to him.

2) They get top rankings quickly only to disappear from the index a few weeks later. This seems to be the case with Taz’s website. He was on top of Google’s results and soon got downgraded severely. Do not feel bad - it usually takes a sustained effort to rank for any sort of mildly-competitive keyword, let along the difficult ones. One month in should not get you a ton of search engine traffic. Google is on my website every day and it can still take a few weeks for a new article to get picked up and put into their index.

My solutions for Taz? Check back tomorrow

Evan Carmichael

Evan Carmichael
YoungEntrepreneur.com Blog Manager

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2 Comments so far

Ryan Caines August 3rd, 2007 7:42 am

Part of Googles algoritm is called ” trustrank ” which in my opinion is what causes the ” sandbox effect “. Every site has a trustrank and the measure of it is not made public. A new website will not be trusted by google so its held out of the main index until its aged sufficiently for it to be trusted or builds its trustrank so its allowed into the results.

Another part of Googles algorithm is ” Temporal Analysis “. This means google can measure things like how often you add links, how often your content changes, how old your site is etc etc.

Often site owners will go on a link building campaign, see their results climb and suddenly fall back 10 pages and stay there for several months. This in my opinion is trustrank penalising the links ( because they are from newish, low traffic, low trust websites or they were built in big lumps rather than a steady stream ) and then temporal analysis monitoring the links you have built until either they age sufficiently or build their own trustrank so your own site can reap the benefits the inbound links can give you.

Trust rank can also get your site listed much more quickly if you get inbound links from trusted sources, it will only sandbox links you have built from low trust websites especially if you add them in sporadic bursts rather than in a steady fashion. Google will smell a rat if you build no links for a few months, then suddenly add a few hundred - its way more advanced than yahoo and msn which is why your rankings remain on the msn engine.

My advice would be get yourself some high quality 1 way links from established, highly trusted websites and you will get out of the sandbox much more quickly and you will reap the benefits without the wait. If you have some cash spare, get yourself listed in some high quality paid directories.

Also if your site is new, the fastest way to get it spidered is by putting links to your website in forum signatures. This wont have a great effect on your rankings but search engines spider forums very regularly and it may help get your site out of the sandbox quicker and get new content spidered more quickly.

That would be my advice anyway! Hope that gives you some ideas

Ryan Caines
www.upperedgemedia.co.uk
YoungEntrepreneur.com Blog » SEO Help - Readers Write - Part 2 August 3rd, 2007 12:42 pm

[…] Following up on yesterday’s post, here are my suggestions for Taz on what he can do to get his website, http://www.beardcareproducts.com, ranked once again in Google:1) Make sure you have not been sandboxed - It was a great idea to sign up for the Webmaster tools to make sure nothing was wrong with the site. Also, a site:www.beardcareproducts.com query reveals that Taz’s pages are not in the supplemental index - another good sign. Keep doing the above board SEO techniques to avoid being penalized. […]