A little new trend started these past few weeks at this blog that gave me a little cause for celebration.
I started getting traffic from Google.
Yes I’ve had the odd hit from Google over the past 8 months since moving ProBlogger to this domain – but the reality has been that since that time 99% of my traffic was from loyal repeat readers or from referrals coming from other blogs.
Why did it take so long?
Well despite my best intentions and thousands of incoming links from other blogs to this site Google seemed to have me on probation. They had me in what some refer to as the sandbox – a place that they seem to keep new sites that they are watching to see if they are spamming the system.
I suspect the reason ProBlogger.net found its way to the sandbox was that it got too many links pointing to it too quickly – and perhaps because it just suddenly appeared on this domain with 100 or so ready made pages which I had transferred across from my previous version of the site. The theory is that spam sites quite often appear on new domains with loads of inbound links and lots of pages over night – and so if any site does so it might just trigger some alarm bells in the Google algorithm.
It’s a theory – one to keep in mind – but one I’m happy to be on the other side on (I hope).
