SEO Headaches: The Sandbox
Entering a new market for any business is never easy, and starting a new SEO campaign on a brand new website is no exception. Any good SEO campaign will be geared towards Google to ensure the site receives the best possible exposure in the search engines. However, it can be a tricky procedure, as Google (though they’ve never publicly said this, only hinted at it) has what is known as a ‘sandbox’.
The name ‘sandbox’ stems from people using juvenile SEO techniques such as buying links from link farms, creating duplicate content and other ‘childish’ black hat techniques. Basically these sites are literally ‘put back in the sandbox’ with the other children!
What do I do if I think my site has been Sandboxed?
Don’t panic! – If you think your site has been sandboxed, the natural reaction may well be to fret over it and send yourself mad with worry. This needn’t be the worst thing in the world, I always say, if you can turn adversity into fortune then you’re in for a stress free, successful life!
Sit back, and look at things objectively, there are things that can be done to help you get some business, even if it’s not going to be as effective as the possibility of catching those high value keywords you originally wanted to target.
Look at your keywords, and try and think ‘outside the box’ – see if you can find some keywords that, although are less popular, will still bring you traffic and sales. Start link building slowly for those phrases, it will, over time strengthen your campaign so isn’t a waste of time at all.
Look at the Longtail. Longtail keywords can be extremely powerful for conversion, and should be incorporated into all SEO campaigns anyway. Build up your content with relevant articles and pages written expressly for this purpose. Your site will be healthier and stronger when finally released from the sandbox, so this is most definitely the way forward.
Search out ‘authority’ links, such as DMOZ, industry standard sites, Fortune 500 sites etc. Also .gov .edu domains can provide relief from the sandbox filter as these are highly trusted sites and are usually exempt from the sandbox.
Think away from Google – often I find my sites perform extremely well on Yahoo and Bing, but start out slow in Google. Although traffic from less widely used search engines will always be much reduced than what you would expect from Google, these search engines shouldn’t ever be overlooked.
Look at generating traffic through social media marketing. Facebook and Twitter are quickly becoming more widely used, and could overtake Google in popularity. You can generate traffic and sales opportunities by using this different approach. There may even be a social media platform related to your industry.
Think about email marketing. If you have a list of existing customers, send them a newsletter telling them about your new site. Always give them the option to unsubscribe – otherwise you could run the risk of losing your existing customers, which would be entirely counterproductive.
If your site has been sandboxed, it can take up to 8 months to be released. However, if you do all the things mentioned above it should perform almost straight away when it is finally released.
You will have a lot of content published on your site targeting the longtail. These pages will still be there, working away for you as long as they remain on your site. Your time will not have been wasted! You may even find that the conversion rate from these pages is higher over time than that from the highly competitive keywords originally picked.
