If you’re into Search Engine Optimization you might be interested in checking out this article and the comments at this Threadwatch post titled Google’s War on SEO. It refers to a recent patent by Google that could shed some light on where they’re going with their algorithm.
It is pretty heavy stuff – but sheds a bit of light on the legendary and often speculated about Google Sandbox. I’m yet to go right through it all – but one of the initial take home comments seems to be that if you want to grow in Google you need to work on ‘natural’ growth and not the sudden appearance of a large site with loads of backlinks to it (which has been an approach of many SEO experts perviously.
This makes sense and is probably good news to bloggers who in most cases grow their blogs pretty slowly over time with a steady growth in backlinks. Anyway – if you’re into this stuff have a read and let us know what it all means to you in comments below.
There is also a good discussion on the same topic at Search Engine Watch.
Please let me know if I’m wrong but Google is just trying to exclude the case where a new site tries to game the system by appearing on the scene with an inordinate amount of backlinks. Where that cutoff (of *too* many backlinks) exist is something that probably needs some examination. Of course, a site that bursts on the scene with 100 backlinks probably has some gaming involved but the blog that an entrenched blogger has created (and thus advertised on his entrenched blog) probably will have more backlinks than the average “just created” blog. We will have to see what will happen I suppose.
Okay, and how am I supposed to add my new project – which I want to promote of course on my several blogsites – so that I only have ‘slow’ growing links? I don’t know of any blogsoftware which says ‘add this link in the sidebar only for two blogs a day’ :(
Good question Nicole – if I were you I’d just do what comes naturally – start your sites – write great quality content and let your inbound links develop naturally as others link up to you. I think the problems come for people who buy into mega automatic link building programs where suddenly thousands of links appear over night to their sites. If you start something with some links coming from a few sites I don’t think its goign to be a big problem. Just work on a quality blog and you’ll do ok.