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Optimizing time for search

Posted by Michael Martinez on January 7, 2008 in Intermediate SEO

Web site aging has gone out of vogue for, as every good link baiter knows, all you need to do to sidestep the Google Sandbox Effect is to attract a lot of trusted links to your site quickly.

Trust and diversity are the keys to building solid search visibility with new Web sites.

However, Google’s recent war against paid linking strategies has laid bare the sorry truth about many people’s so-called optimization: a lot of folks have been buying trust and diversity and they got nailed for it.

While Googlers may slap themselves on the back for their self-imagined cleverness, the truth is that the quality of Google’s search results continues to decline and the link brokerages are moving underground, thus making Google’s task more difficult than ever. As I have said often before, every advance in the constant struggle between search engines and Web marketers only leads to an escalation of tactics and tools.

In the meantime, people who are now afraid to buy links for new Web sites are about to meet the Modified Google Sandbox Effect. Let’s call it Sandbox Effect 2.0, even though (so far) it appears to me to only be the old Sandbox Effect 1.0.

You can get a new site indexed pretty quickly with the XML sitemaps but Google has been dumping new sites after only a couple of weeks if they don’t draw a sufficient number of trusted links. Call this the “Constructed Link Bounce Effect”. That is, if you cannot buy the links but instead prefer to build them, you have to have a large, diverse network of trusted Web sites in order to ensure that your new site’s growing link profile is strong enough to keep the site in the index.

Google will drop a site if only because it doesn’t recrawl the site. If a site is so new that Google doesn’t know anything about it, then Google probably won’t do the site any favors by sending crawlers around frequently. Frequent crawling is crucial to search visibility not only because it helps keep your pages indexed, it helps your changes show up in a timely fashion.

Frequently updated blogs are often crawled frequently because of their strong internal linkage and because of their pinging. Blogs that don’t ping don’t get crawled very quickly. Blogs that ping the major services get crawled very quickly.

But if you’re not launching a blog you don’t get to ping (although you could manufacture pings but most people don’t know how and won’t go to that kind of effort). A traditional non-blog Web site therefore needs links to show the search engines that it is loved and trusted and part of the Web community.

There are two kinds of links: those that pass value (Traffic, Visibility, Crawling, Trust, Anchor Text, PageRank, and Credibility) and those that don’t pass value. Most links do NOT pass value for one reason or another.

Among the value-passing links there are two sub-divisions: those that pass more value and those that pass less value. Call them strong links and weak links. How do you tell the difference between a strong link and a weak link? In most cases you cannot, although the more tests you develop for your link analysis the more accurate your assessments will become.

There are many different ways to test pages with links on them. Regretfully, I don’t have time to go into the details of such tests, but think about the different ways you can value links. You should easily be able to list ten methods of assessing value in links.

If we assume for the sake of discussion that you don’t have any strong links to work with (technically, that should be strong linking pages then you have two choices: take the spammers’ route and build thousands of relatively useless weak links quickly or else find some strong linking pages that will link to your new site.

A third option is to build your own strong linking pages, which most people would regard as a “Catch-22 Proposition”. How do you build strong linking pages if you don’t have any strong links to point at the pages?

An old trick that some people still employ is Web site aging. You build a Web site and put some content on it and start pointing weak links at it in a slow, continual process. It can take six months to a year but you’ll eventually create substantial value in your aged Web site. It doesn’t have to be particularly spectacular.

Web site aging is a more feasible proposition than link baiting because most sites cannot benefit from link baiting. Some people have estimated that only 5% of Web sites can draw value through link baiting. The drawbacks for Web site aging, however, are that you need to create sites that are wothy of at least a few natural links. They don’t have to be the most popular sites in their niches, just useful and interesting enough to earn some links.

As your inventory of aged Web sites grows you can use them to launch new Web sites more quickly, which is great for someone selling their Search Engine Optimization services who plans to be in the business for a while but not so great for someone who just wants to launch another eCommerce site.

To reduce that Sandbox Window you need to develop a plan that is easy to implement, requires no software or automated link creation, and which draws upon existing Web resources that have not been totally humiliated by link spam. You may need to buy some links but if you’re going to buy links you should think in terms of how to buy links that accompany some other value.

You don’t need THAT many links. You just need enough links to validate your Web site with the search engines, enough to show them that your site is worth indexing and keeping indexed. You need enough links to ensure regular crawling.

To design that kind of plan quickly you need to spend 2-3 weeks doing research. You need to pick about 2 dozen potential linking partner sites and track their search visibility. How often do their new pages show up? How often do their old pages vanish from the search results? How easy is it to obtain a crawlable link from them? Don’t even think about anchor text or PageRank. Your objective is to think about links as conduits for value, not as arbiters of value.

If you launch a Web site today and get it indexed with XML Sitemaps, it may or may not stay in the search results. To improve your chances of achieving quick stability you want to place your own links on Web sites you value and trust. If you don’t have those sites you need to create a list of such sites. You need to place 2-5 links per day over the course of about 15-20 business days.

If you cannot achieve search index stability with 30 inbound links from a diverse number of sites (of different types and purposes), you’ve done something seriously wrong. Most sites never need more than 30-50 links. Some sites do quite well with only 5-10 inbound links.

The best strategy when you’re confronted with a shrinking time window is to invest as much time in research as possible. You’re doomed if you tell yourself you don’t have time to sit and browse the Web. Your failure is all but guaranteed if you take the short, easy path. Temptation leads you astray, not aright.

If you have just launched a new Web site and you don’t have a list of 20-50 trusted linking sources available you can still work on acquiring those links. You may, however, have to live with a few weeks — perhaps a few months’ — of lost search visibility. Google is not very forgiving or tolerant when it decides a site should be dumped.

These sites are not penalized — at least not in the typical sense. They’re just deemed unimportant and not worth indexing. You can point a multitude of links at them and it may still take Google several months to start indexing pages. One little mistake can be catastrophic.

So when you’re building links for a site that has vanished from the search results for lack of links, you need to focus on building non-search visibility for the site. Link dropping in your forum signatures and blog comments won’t do the trick. You need to create content about your content.

But that’s the “what do we do if we came to this optimizing time thing too late?” strategy.

For those of you who have yet to launch those new sites, you still have time to decide WHERE you’re going to get your trust-conferring links. You still have time to build the list of linking partners through your research.

1 link won’t do it. 2 links won’t do it. 10 links won’t do it.

But your very first link may prove to be the only one you need.

Two very common mistakes that people make is deciding they have to have X number of links or deciding they have to engage in continual link building.

It is better to look at your link development in terms of time: how long do you have to build those first few links? How much time can you devote to building those first few links? How long will it take you to find good linking resources? How long should you wait before you decide your links didn’t work?

To do this right you have to know the caching history of the sites you’re working with. You may want to use a spreadsheet. You want to look at these pages until you’re sick of them. You want to be completely familiar with their terms of service, rules, guidelines, or whatever.

To do this right, you need to understand there are as many different ways to get links as there are types of Web sites. To do this right, you have to look beyond the social media profile rut to pages that actually possess and pass value. You should be reasonably confident that every link you place has a good chance of passing value because of your research, not because some idiiot said on a blog or a forum that you can get good links from source X.

To do this right you need a calendar, a stop watch, and a sense of finite commitment. This should be no more complicated or burdensome than mowing a yard of grass, washing a car, or cleaning the gutters on your roof. You should be able to engage in the operation for up to a month and then walk away knowing that you’ve got some pretty good links in place.

Why are they good? Because Crawling, PageRank, and Anchor Text are only three of the types of value a link can pass. If you’re getting Credibility, Visibility, and Traffic from your 30-days’ worth of links, who cares if you have search visibility?

In short, think of a 30-day launch plan that encompasses every aspect of rolling out your Web site. After the 30 days are finished you should be finished. Optimization will have to continue through the years but link building is not optimization. Link building is just link building.

Just because it looks hard doesn’t mean it has to be hard. You don’t need to send out emails asking for links from .EDU pages. You don’t have to swap links with strangers if you don’t want to. You can and SHOULD buy links from Google-approved link selling sources (business directories).

Take your time because you have all the time in the world if you only limit yourself to 30 days of building links. Remember the old hunter’s adage: when you’re hunting with a single bullet, you take your best shot.