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Into Search Engine Sandbox and Back: Things You Can Do
After writing a business plan, devising a marketing strategy, developing a web site and applying some SEO tricks, your site starts appearing on the first page in different search engines. Many would agree that while it’s not that hard to bring a web site to the first page, it’s much harder to keep it there. There are many reports of sites disappearing from the face of search engines altogether after a very successful beginning. It’s a fact. Whether you call is a “sandbox” or anything else, it does not matter. What matters is that it happens to many. Here are some steps that may help to bring your site back to where it was, or at least, move it closer to the first page.
- Show search engines that you own the domain name.
Whether you use a newly registered domain name or not, make sure that it is registered or renewed for more than one year. If you can, renew it for ten years and keep renewing it every year, to keep it at ten years. Search engines are more likely to favour long-registered domains. Many domains that are set to expire soon get hijacked by domain squatters and used for spam. And if you are a search engine, you would want to protect yourself from that.
- Include full contact details
Make sure that your web site has a proper “Contact Us” and “About Us” pages. Where possible, use your legal business name and office street address and real phone numbers. Add your business to “local business search” and pin point your business location on the map.
- Undo what you did wrong in SEO
If you feel like your overstepped the line in your search engine optimisation practices, try to undo it. Remove keyword staffing, blog spamming, and if possible links that you bought in the past. Try to make your SEO as natural as possible. At the same time, keep on the good practices, such as good content creation link building and so on.
- Use nofollow back linking
Most SEO companies focus on “Do-follow” link building, since “nofollow” links don’t pass any link “juice” to the site. While this is true, this can back-fire in a big way. The truth is that most of social networking sites out there, blogs, forums, online communities, have “nofollow” links. Having such links is natural from the point of view of the major search engines. Having only “dofollow” inbound links is very un-natural and is a sure giveaway that your site is trying to manipulate the search engine ranking. The more “nofollow” links you have, the more natural you are going to look in this Web 2.0 world.
- Links anchor text
While appropriate anchor text is absolutely critical for the SEO, unless it’s the name of your company or a product that you sell, it look un-natural if all your inbound links have the same anchor text. Again, if different people were all linking to your web site, it is highly unlikely that they would all use the same anchor text.
These are just a few major points to consider in your online marketing adventure. Together with patience and commitment your site should be back to where it was in no time.
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