A Way Around the Sandbox Effect

The sandbox effect has been written about by myself and many others that have followed it since ’03-’04 by many in the SEO profession. This filtering out of new sites that are “un-trusted” by the search engines are relegated to sit in obscurity until they can be verified and let out into the SERPS (search engine page results). This is a period of time that is an average of six months and can be longer or shorter according to unknown criteria employed by the search engines.

In the public service I want to comment on my successes of late in getting new sites broken out and noticed, crawled and placed in the SERPS. There are several methods I have used to do this and it is working quite effectively. Below are elements that aid in this effort and will work well to get you noticed fast. I will expound upon them after listing them below.

1. Google Webmaster Tools are essential in getting you listed on a new site on the big kahoona. You should have an existing Webmaster Tool Account with another site that is already listed.

2. A very active Blog is most effective. By active, I mean that you are posting well written articles that contain careful keyword usage. The Blog/Website should be carefully crafted with in-page optimization and cross linking for exciting ping-backs.

3. Social network submission on a daily basis for approximately a week with crafty title tags. Automate your social submissions so that all is done for you so that you can continue your written barrage of daily written articles regarding your business.

4. Write professionally for a living. Your payoff will be amazing if you can produce interesting copy about your company or offering. Do not worry about those that will try to mimic what you do. Be a trend setter not a follower.

5. Submit to smaller search engines along with the big ones.

The above four elements sound so simple to do but they are a challenge to some folks. Google Webmaster Tools is a way to get your site trusted if you already own a website. You can get noticed very quickly. Google will not always list your site as being indexed right away but who cares as long as you get into the SERPS, you will have something with which you can begin to improve upon.

A Blog is a way to get your site noticed quickly with a lot of pages. Quantity is very important because you will not go unnoticed. Your site will achieve what all the lazy black hats want for their sites but are now having trouble doing. There is no substitute for site copy and this is demonstrated by all of the angst I feel when my work is plagiarized. Content is the key to your success.

You need to write like a journalist or you need to hire a writer that can produce good clean and interesting site copy on a daily basis. This is war and the better writers are going to prevail in this battle. I received an email yesterday from a black hat offering software that “legally” scrapes content and automatically posts it on websites. The black hats are scrambling for content because it works. Links are secondary and Google is cracking down on the link spammers even having offered a new snitch program to help them in this regard.

Social networks are the new avenue to get listed. These sites are networked and everybody is using them. You can automate your social submissions so that your new articles are automatically posted on them. If you hand submit, pay close attention to the “title” tag as you want a unique tag for every submission and you want it to be relative to the keywords usage within your article and you want your pages to be titled along with your site at the biggest audience.

While big search is busy filtering out new sites, a large amount of the smaller search engines are taking listings and posting them immediately. Use this avenue to GET NOTICED!

-Bob W