Wanna get that Google page rank just a little higher or just increase your overall knowledge of SEO? Here’s a sweet tip from Robert “I can out design you with my left arm tied behind my back AND I really did invent WordPress, no really” Soap (that’s our nickname for him – he would be to humble to come up with something that awesome):

Google tests new domains their crawlers find on the interwebs for CTR. That at least is my consensus of it: it is more often than not the case that you’ll see a relatively high placement in the first few days of a new domain being up, maybe even weeks. It’s not at all unusual for the site to drop immensely after that though; like from position 5 to position 65, or even a lot lower. “Thin” affiliate sites with little content on them and affiliate links all over the place generally qualify for this.

What Google does is it tests how the site performs (i.e. ctr, bounce rate, visitor path after viewing it, repeated searches for the same keyword after viewing the page, etc.), plus how many backlinks it gets in the initial high-exposure phase. The algorithm uses this as a means to determine the quality of a new domain.

I have almost always managed to keep a site at its initial ranking, or close to it, after it was launched. In other words, it is not so hard to avoid the “sandbox”. The sandbox is where your domain goes after the initial high ranking. It can stay there for up to 6 months.

This is where fresh and rich content comes in: regularly updated content will make G stray away from sandboxing a new domain. Leaving affiliate links or ads off a domain until it is “over the hill” will help also. It’s not said that your site will get sandboxed just because it has affiliate links on it, but in my experience, it does play a role. Fresh content is what matters: the more often it is added, the better.

A way to add fresh content to your site would be to add new inside pages on a semi-regular basis. They don’t have to be linked to from the top menu and they can be fluff, but they should be somewhat unique. An idea would be to have a link in the footer, “Resources”, and have that page be a collection of links to more inside pages, each with short articles. They can really be short and they should each be on one of the four main topics of the site and link back to that page in their content. Users won’t likely see these pages but SE’s will and that’s what you want.

<3 Soap

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