|pros • per • ly|

I have seen over the years that if you build your link popularity naturally you can move up in the search rankings fairly quickly even if your website is new. In fact I have done it enough that when it doesn’t happen I am very surprised.

That is why I have been confused when working with a friend of mine who started a website about 4 and a half months ago. He has implemented full boar every single thing I ever asked him to do. He is very motivated and so often does more than I ask him to do. Based on my past (and current) experience by now his site should be showing on page 1 of Google for hundreds of terms and his site should be generating a lot of income.

For some reason though, his rankings aren’t there. After looking into the issue I noticed that websites ranking on the first page of Google for his competitive key phrases have under 1000 back links. These are websites that have been around for several years.

So I did a backlink check for my friends website that is 4 months old and he is showing 22,000 backlinks. This huge disparity is probably throwing up a big red flag to the search engines that a new site is getting that many links.

Even though he could have naturally acquired these links, the difference in the amount his competitors have from how many links he has makes it so his link building doesn’t appear natural to the search engines. Because of this they have probably put his site into a mini sandbox.

Eventually I expect his rankings to hit and hit hard and he will start making a lot of money but until his site gets more age, and the search engines see that he will keep getting more links, he will just have to wait.

What you should take away from this? – Don’t get too many links too quickly as it can have a negative effect on your rankings. Especially avoid site-wide links in the beginning if you can help it.

You may have noticed that Google’s search results are a little different. If you have a gmail account, google adwords, google adsense, or google analytics account then most likely you are signed in under your account name when you go to Google’s home page.

If that is the case then Google has added a new feature to their search results. They call it Search Wiki. Google offers you the option of promoting or deleting search results. In other words if you do a search and find certain results to be more helpful than others, then you promote them to the top of your results.

Here is a snapshot of what it looks like:

I first noticed this when I was checking to see where a certain term was ranking for one of my websites.  I saw that I could delete all of my competitors listings and promote mine to the top. What a great idea. Wrong. About a week later I was checking rankings again and low and behold and to my surprise my site was ranking #1 for my main term. I was so excited I gave my brother a high 5 and hugged my wife.

There was one problem, no increase in traffic. If anything, the traffic was lower than normal. So I checked rankings on another computer…there we were at number 6. I checked all of Google’s datacenters and each one showed us at #6. I had completely forgotten that I had “promoted” my site to the top position and now unless I sign out of my google account I can’t see where I actually rank.

So in conclusion, as fun as it might be to promote your own site to the top spot and delete out your competitors, it doesnt serve any purpose to do that and you won’t be able to check your true rankings anymore.