New Blogs Need Special SEO Treatment

If you’ve spent a lot of time running a flagship blog it is easy to forget about the issues bloggers that use a niche blogging approach face. There are lots of theories about the Google sandbox and the way Google handles young blogs with freshly registered domains.

From my experience Google gives sites a ‘trial run’ where upon first indexing the blog is given unnaturally high rankings for a few weeks and if it doesn’t gain enough links/content during that trial period it is de-indexed (sandboxed). Or if it gains some links/content it is given given lower rankings which have to be built up from scratch the old fashioned way.

I’ve found this out from starting several niche blogs some of which have kept the good initial rankings, some have been sandboxed and some have had their rankings lowered after the ‘trial period’. I have experienced every scenario and want to share what I believe the reasons Google treated my niche blogs differently.

Race Analogy For Google Ranking New Blogs

It is like you are running a race with a head start but also a heavy weight is tied to your ankle for being a newcomer. You have to run extra hard to stay ahead. If you cannot stay ahead of the other runners for x amount of time you are disqualified for the rest of that season but if you can stay ahead for long enough your weight is removed and you become one of the other normal runners.

How To Stay Ahead

• Churn out much more content. I’m not saying you should compromise quality for quantity but as a new site you have to teach the Googlebot who is boss by training it to visit your blog often. I would actually say this is more important than large scale link building because Google are more strict about gaining links to fast, but they lap up all the content gladly.
• Get a few quality links. You need this for Google to index you. Otherwise you could be waiting months if all you do is submit your blog to Google Webmaster Tools. Obviously relevancy helps but to get that initial indexing a link from an off-topic site will do the trick.
• Don’t go overboard on affiliate links. It is easy to ignore this because we want to, but I have experienced entire blogs being de-indexed after adding to many (un-cloaked) affiliate links. Google doesn’t trust your domain yet so take it slow.
• Spread the link building out. You want the Google bot to see an increase in links each time it arrives but you will have a limited number of ways to easily get links. It works well to build some links, wait for indexing, build some more, wait to be crawled again, build more links etc.

I know these are things you would be doing normally anyway, but with a new blog if you get lazy the consequences will be far worse.

Do you have any other tricks to avoid early de-indexing and getting a new blog off to the best start?

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!