There is a great post over at The Return of Design that shows the danger in your site becoming too big to quickly in the eyes of Search Engines. James Archer reflects upon the rise massive popularity of Forty Media when it first launched and the consequences:
‘There’s a catch, though. We were a new site with a new domain name, and within weeks we had thousands of incoming links from keyword-rich sites. We initially thought that it would be great for our search engine rankings, but there was one critical point we had failed to consider:
Sudden movements make Google nervous.
The great success that our marketing effort, from the perspective of the objective mathematical formulas that run the Google search engine, probably looked a whole lot like search engine spam.’
The tips that James gives at the end of this article are well worth listening to. The message is to build a site slow and steady where you have some control over it. This is a lesson I’ve had to learn on a number of my blogs of late – including this one here at ProBlogger.net.
I’ve been amazed by the amount of links that have been pointed at this blog since moving it to this domain in February this year – however the downside of this is as James says being seen as a suspicious site by Google for getting too popular too quickly.
Life goes on however and if you’ve been ‘sandboxed’ like this have patience – keep blogging and in time you’ll find things change (as they gradually are here).
