Chapter 21 Be Patient
There is probably no other piece of advice that is as important as this. It takes time to do anything and there is no way that you are going to become an instant success. If you take the success stories of any person, you will find that there are two things in common, hard work and time.
Do not start a website unless you feel passionate that it will work. If you do believe that it will work you should be willing to sacrifice a lot of time and effort to make it work. Even if you have the best content and do everything else that is supposed to guarantee that your site will become a hit, you still need to give sufficient time for it to work.
Google sandbox
Another reason for being patient is because of something that is commonly referred to as the Google sandbox. This sandbox is just a theory that a number of webmasters feel is true although Google has not come right out and admitted it. A few things that they have mentioned however seem to indicate that there is a sandbox that Google uses.
This sandbox is just a virtual box where Google dumps new websites or sites that Google believes are setting out deliberately to cheat their search engine or even sites that have been taken over by spammers. Since there is no direct confirmation from Google that there is really a sandbox finding out if your website is there is a little difficult.
There are a few pointers though. First, if you have just launched your website, it is almost guaranteed that your site is there. It is possible that your site can have a page rank, and it may even pop up on subsidiary searches, but any direct search will not show your site on the results page.
This sandboxing is different from Google penalizing you. If you are in penalty then you will lose your page rank and sometimes the Google search area may even be grayed out. In the sandbox, the website just sits around until Google deems it to be a worthy website to start to display on its results page.
Why this sandbox
Since designing web pages is actually not as expensive as other forms of marketing, many organizations started to create websites just for promotional purposes and then shut them down. This meant that there were a number of results with broken links in Google, not a good thing for any search engine.
Spammers are another reason for this. Until this sandboxing by Google started, spammers used to start a site just to send out spam, but these sites tended to get very high ranking in a short time, once again something that search engines do not want in their results.
There are a number of other reasons for Google adopting this policy, but suffice it to say that it is there for a purpose, to weed out the real from the fake. The duration that websites stay in this sandbox can last anywhere between a couple of months to a year. Nobody has too much information about this, and your guess is probably as good as any other person’s out there. The only thing that you can do here is to be patient. Continue with adding in more content and link back, in short, continue to operate as if your website were not in limbo. There are two reasons for this. One is the very simple reason that Google is not going to notify you before it removes your site from its sandbox and unless you are prepared you will be caught napping.
The other reason is that you can take this time to refine your website so that once it comes out of the sandbox you will be ready to take advantage of an exponential increase in your ranking.
You can’t beat it
There are a number of websites that offer supposedly guaranteed ways to remove your site from the sandbox, but it is good to take all this advice with a pinch of salt. Google has done this with a purpose and unless you can show a specific cause, there is no reason for them to excuse you. Even if you do everything that you can think of to show Google that you are really a genuine site, there is no guarantee that it will work.
It is much better to include this time into your ramping up schedule but have a strategy in place to take advantage of the time that your website comes out of the sandbox.
Of course, you can purchase an established site instead of creating one of your own, which means that you can hit the ground running, but even here, people have found that sites that frequently change their owners find themselves put into the sandbox. It is useless to speculate on why this happens. A much better idea is for you to accept it and plan accordingly.
The Newbie Guide to Traffic Generation
- Chapter 1 Increase Traffic to Your Website
- Chapter 2 Web Content
- Chapter 3 Don’t Send Newsletters
- Chapter 4 Become a Community Member
- Chapter 5 Get Experts to Write Articles
- Chapter 6 Use Tracking Software
- Chapter 7 Use of Keyword Tools
- Chapter 8 Copy Others
- Chapter 9 Focus on the Popular Portions of Your Site
- Chapter 10 Give Freebies
- Chapter 11 Advertise!
- Chapter 12 Build a Brand
- Chapter 13 The Right Software is Essential
- Chapter 14 Optimize Content
- Chapter 15 Meta-tags
- Chapter 16 Blog
- Chapter 17 Hold-off on Comments
- Chapter 18 Have a Sitemap
- Chapter 19 High Traffic Days!
- Chapter 20 Use Online Communities
- Chapter 21 Be Patient
- Chapter 22 Be Nice
- Chapter 23 Conclusion
