SEO Myths
January 18th, 2008
A happy Friday to all.
There is an absolute plethora of misinformation out there about SEO, so as my contribution to
the community, I’m going to dispell a few SEO myths.
There is no such thing as a sandbox. Yes, that is correct, there is no Google sandbox.
If your brand spanking new page is not immediately indexed, it’s because you don’t have
enough links, or Google has not updated its index to reflect your site’s inclusion yet.
I’ve had sites that were plastered with ads indexed within 2 hours, and I’ve had sites
white as the driven snow with 50 backlinks from trusted domains take ages to get indexed.
Which brings me to my next point: edu = gov = com = info = net = org = …
The TLD of a domain matters about as much as the color pants you’re wearing when you get a link from it. It’s *trust* that makes a good link, not its TLD.
Pagerank doesn’t matter either. It’s just an arbitrary standard produced by a company who has one and
only one ultimate goal - to make money. The only reason to ever worry about the pagerank of your pages
is so that you can sell links to suck..er…other webmasters who care about such things.
There is no duplicate content penalty! I cannot emphasize this enough. Google itself is just
a giant content scraper. There are millions of blogs and aggregators out there that just copy
other content. As long as you credit the source, you have nothing to worry about if your
content is not original. Just remember who the biggest content theif on the web is, and
that they made 10 billion dollars last year.
That’s all for now. Hope to catch you all later.
-V
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HOLY SHIT! A real post!
roflmao
Nice one lad.
/p
Comment by perkiset — January 23, 2008 @ 2:16 am
The “sandbox” as I understand it has nothing to do with getting indexed… it is to do with the ability of a new site to rank in the SERP for given terms.
So, a “sandboxed” site can:
Be be 100% indexed according to a “site:domain.com” search.
Have better content than its competitors.
Have better links than its compeititors.
… and still not appear anywhere useful in the SERP…. until X time has passed when it is allowed to rank.
Have you tested this theory in a competitive / heavily spammed areas like credit, payday loans, mobile phones, viagra etc… i.e. are you able to jump straight into the SERP in these niches in the way you can with niche sites???
I can rank a “poodle training” site pretty quickly… but the over spammed niches I would say I my sites have been sandboxed.
I have a new site which has been “sandboxed”. It is 100% indexed. It is WH. It has good backlinks and good content etc. It is better than 90% of the other sites in the SERP… my rank on my main target keyword:
Yahoo #1
Live # 11
Google #120
And it is absolutely stuck at #120… nothing will move it above that spot…
Ref domains… supposedly hyphenated domains receive less “trust” from G…. so domains are indirectly relevant.
Comment by Jez — August 26, 2008 @ 6:27 am
I also had always thought that there is no duplicate content penalty.
Comment by Kenney — August 29, 2008 @ 11:52 am
I agree with the duplicate penalty thing. However, in my experience I have to say that I side with Jez on the sandbox thing.
Jez’s description is accurately laid out. I can rank a site in a niche that gets little traffic and it stays there, ranking for the main keyword. However if your new site is in a competitive niche and you are getting traffic, then the sandbox seems to take effect.
I had a site that was ranking for its main term after building just 50 or so anchored links. Next thing I know, it’s on page 23 in the serps. I quit working on it only to watch it emerge 4 months later and take position one. It has stayed at position one for a long time now. This happens all the time to me but only if the site brings in traffic. If it’s just trickle traffic I usually avoid the sandbox.
To work around this I now buy pre owned domains that are still indexed, if the niche is going to be a traffic niche. So far so good.
Comment by Edgar — February 18, 2009 @ 2:14 am