Looks like a big coincidence, doesn’t it? After I mentioned my drastic drop in hits from Google in my gaming blog, Darren from ProBlogger makes a brilliant post called “What to do when your Google traffic disappears.
Go there. Read it. Now. But come back here, afterwards. 
One of the points Darren makes is very important - in an already successful blog or site, such a drop in Google search rankings (whether caused by the Google Sandbox or something else) can mean a drop in your earnings of 2/3 or more! 
What if your blog has been slowly but surely growing, and you’re starting to see some money, which causes you to see the “light at the end of the tunnel”… and suddenly, earnings drop down to a trickle, almost nobody comes from Google… it’s enough to make many people quit blogging, or at least hoping to one day make a living from it.
But, as Darren says, all of this - again, whether it’s the Sandbox or not - is temporary. It may take a couple of months, but you’ll get back to good positions in Google, eventually. Meanwhile, keep blogging, keep improving your blog, and get ready for the big comeback, when suddenly you’re flooded with hits. And clicks.
Remember a post of mine, less than 2 weeks ago, where I mentioned how this blog was in the Sandbox (and so almost nobody came here from Google, and those that did, came because they searched for stuff the blog is not about, like a misspelling of Sudoku), but my “Games of my Life” blog wasn’t, and actually got great Google results?
Well, in the last couple of days, I’ve noticed in the logs that the number of hits from Google searches almost stopped rising.
So, I went to Google, and googled for the same search terms… and nothing. The blog’s articles are nowhere to be seen in the first page of results.
I’m all for stopping splogs (spam blogs), but I think the Google guys (or their algorithms) are being overzealous. I mean, that blog is 100% original content, and hasn’t suddenly got an avalanche of links from other sites (which is always suspicious).
Oh well… I guess I’ll just have to weather it. It’ll pass, eventually.
As you should know :), this particular blog has been around for 2 months, and it gets a lot of hits per day. However, very few (relatively speaking) come from search engines. And the ones that do come…
… well, let’s say that the top 5 searches are related to Sudoku. Which I only mentioned once, in a post about a version for Series 60 phones. And the top search string is actually a misspell, coming from a user comment.
In other words: virtually no one arrives here because he or she searched for something that this blog is about. Not technology, not games, not software, not blogging tips. No, people come here because they misspell “sudoku” in Google. 
Yet, the blog is relatively well linked, having earned a PageRank of 5, and having almost 50 blogs linking to it, according to Technorati.
Weird, isn’t it?
Continue reading ‘Funny things about search engine positions’
From ProBlogger, a way to make it so that Chitika eMiniMalls ads (in non-contextual mode) use (optionally) the search terms that brought someone from a search engine to that particular page.
In other words: let’s say someone searches for “cheese dip”, and one of the results is a page in your blog or site. The user clicks on that link, and, as you should know, those terms appear in the referrer page, in your server logs - which log analysers can then use to give you the “top search terms”.
With this method, the Chitika ad will also use those terms (remember, in non-contextual mode you already have to give it a list of product and/or product types), giving it a large change of having an ad about cheese dip (in this case) - even if your blog isn’t really about cheese dip (though that particular page probably mentioned it somewhere). The idea here is that someone who searched for cheese dip is most likely to be interested in an ad about cheese dip - more so than in whatever the blog is really about.
I’m not using it in any of my sites right now, as it’s yet doubtful whether that makes the ads “contextual” (which means that they can’t be used together with AdSense), but it’s certainly an interesting idea.
Yesterday’s Google PageRank update was the main SEO-related happening, of course, but there was another: they also updated backlinks.
Backlinks are what you get when you go to Google and search for “link:address” (e.g. “link:www.thetlog.net“). It was a bit annoying that MSN Search and Yahoo Search showed many backlinks to my (less than 3-months old) blogs, but Google didn’t. Until yesterday.
That update also made Silktide SiteScores go up a bit, which is always nice.
Again, my gaming blog seems to be too new to be affected: it still has a PR of 0, and 0 backlinks. Oh well, that’ll change 3 months from now…
Again, I have to be completely unoriginal and credit Darren for the information.
Google is, at this very moment, updating the visible PageRank (PR). You can see the update almost in real time by using the Future PageRank Tool - it shows the PR for a particular URL in several of Google’s servers. A few hours ago, the PR for this site had only been updated in 2 servers; right now it’s been updated in 6 of them.
A little explanation: Google updates the PR continuously. However, the visible PR is updated only every 3 months or so. That means there’s not any jump in hits from Google when they change this site’s PR from 0 to 5 (it was 0 because it’s less than 3 months old). They do it this way because, otherwise, SEO people would spend all the time changing little things and checking how they influenced PR.
PR, by the way, is determined by how many sites link to yours, but also by how high those sites’ own PR is. So, a link from a top site (without the “rel=nofollow”) is very, very desirable.
As I said, this blog now has a PR of 5. My philosophical blog and my personal blog will both have a PR of 4. My forum is PR 3. And, unfortunately, my gaming blog will remain as PR 0, apparently… it’s too new. Oh well…
In Matt Cutts (who works at Google)’s blog, I’ve just read an article: What’s an update? (saw it mentioned in ProBlogger) which leads me to think that the complete lack of backlinks to this very site in Google may not be related to the Sandbox at all (though, looking at the few search words that bring people here, I still think I’m in it).
Instead, apparently, Google only updates the backlinks it shows (not their database, but just what is visible to the public) every 3 months or so. This site isn’t 2 months old yet.
The likely result of this is that, in little more than one month from now, I will probably have backlinks from hundreds of places (I hope :)), but there won’t be a jump in how I actually rank in Google searches, because Google is already using that information, it just isn’t showing it.
What will affect those ranks is, probably:
- more and more people linking to this blog, or to particular articles in it;
- the site becoming “older” - apparently, it helps; and
- getting out of the Sandbox, assuming this site is in it.
Amazing article about the Google Sandbox. Saw it mentioned in ProBlogger. I guess you learn something new every day…
Excerpt:
What is the Google Sandbox?
The Google Sandbox is an alleged filter placed on new websites. The result is a site does not receive good rankings for its most important keywords and keyword phrases. Even with good content, abundant incoming links and strong Google PageRank, a site is still adversely affected by the Sandbox effect. The Sandbox acts as a de facto probation for sites, possibly to discourage spam sites from rising quickly, getting banned, and repeating the process.
Yes, this very site is currently in the Sandbox. It’s still less than a month and a half old, so I guess it’s normal. That explains why I get so few hits from Google searches, even though the site is very well indexed (and regularly crawled) by it.
Supposedly, when a site gets out of the Sandbox, it starts getting a deluge of hits from Google. I can’t wait.
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