SEO Articles

The Sandbox Theory - How to escape the SEO Venus flytrap

For those of us who have heard of the Venus flytrap know that it traps flies and spiders in it’s jaw like leaves and hold them there with no escape while it slowly devours them. It would appear that Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has its own Venus flytrap known as the ‘sandbox theory’, although we don’t know if it really does exist. However going by popular speculation from many search professionals, it does exist in various argued forms and is a danger to new websites. Luckily, unlike its Amazon counterpart it does not completely devour its prey.

Google has always preserved that “The Sandbox” is a figment of SEO companies’ imagination derived from SEO companies need to satisfy themselves and their client’s by making the name synonymous with the delayed time between the promotion of a website and it gaining results. It would appear logical that a new website would need to work its way up the rakings by building itself over time and can not expect instant positions after launch. This phase can be anywhere from as little as 2-3 months up to 1 year. Going by the number of companies that now resort to spamming and under hand techniques to get their website ranked, it would appear that a sandbox policy would be a perfect system to weed out the work of ‘bedroom bandits’ and black hat SEO techniques. The downside to this system is that some legitimate websites also get caught in the trap for sometimes exaggerated periods of time.

So for the sake of argument let us assume that every new website falls into the sandbox and gets out, some enjoying their stay more than others. Hence the big question is, with new websites, how do you cut this period short and adapt your SEO strategy to factor in this difficult period during a website’s infancy?

Build a strategic relationship

Link building can fall into different categories. Of these, some add strategic value to your business while others are simply a vote, a point if you will to help with your SEO rankings. Both of these are important but some more than others during the initial stages of a site launch when a search engines have yet to clarify its authenticity. We would recommend sourcing links from websites that are themselves viewed as highly credible and have a relationship with the new site. These websites should ideally be of associated group companies, business partners and other known, trusted industry resources. The impact of a few such links from relevant sections can dramatically scale down the sandbox period and if you’re lucky might even transfer some page rank in the process.

Provide a prelaunch preview

Between the time you decide to launch a website and the launch itself, there is always a gestation period which might last as little as 3 weeks but can range upward to even 4 months. This time should be utilised by companies in putting up a few holding pages with content or news about the new website and other relevant snippets of information. Normally developers put up one page with images and maybe an email address which provides no information to a search engine about the website to come or the nature of the business. Further to the previous point, smaller content rich websites are easier to get out of the sandbox. If this is done effectively, when the new site is launched the domain would have already built up some credibility and presence allowing the finished website to index and rank sooner than if it had no previous history. This same theory partly applies to the suggested advantages of buying existing domain names for new websites.

Keep it static simple (KISS)

Many websites these days employ complex technologies and database systems to provide cleaver features for its users to enhance usability and conversion paths. Unfortunately many of these such as timeouts, sessions and flash banners provide a hindrance for search engines to crawl a website efficiently. However this does not mean that a website has to be something you’d expect in the mid 90’s. A professional SEO company will aid you in working around your complex designs and in circumstances where dynamic back end systems or flash are causing problems, a few solid static pages with regularly updated content and a firm architecture can be a strong solution to SEO woes when combined with the right links and foundation already detailed above.

In addition the above your SEO Company should as standard, carry out manual site submission and the submissions of .xml site map files to accelerate the frequency of search spiders and efficiency of page indexing.

When looking at the search engine optimisation strategy as a whole. The early stages of a websites development and certainly the first 2-3 months of promotion are crucial to the acceleration and success of its optimisation results moving forwards. Many companies wait until the site is up for many months before consulting with a search marketing expert and are then frustrated to learn that they could have been ranking and generating business already had they taken this into account far earlier.

The early stages of development and pre-launch are the perfect times to gauge the technical strengths and weaknesses of your site, conduct the necessary keyword research, audience traffic potential research and initiate a plan for social media. Also what is often overlooked is that much of the on-site SEO work can be done more effortlessly during the build stage. Many of the activities outlined are surprisingly time consuming even for the experts and if they are cut short or not given the attention they need then much of the value of these activities are lost and the sites potential suffers right from the start.

Anant Swarup

Mediarun Search 14th October 2008

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