Search Engine and Website:  Articles-Info-Tips-Questions-Answers

Often times there are lots of questions, concerns and new information out there about websites, search engines and the internet in general. Here we'll try to provide you with as much informative helpful information as we can.

Google SandBox - What is it?

While not a proven tactic, and certainly Google will never admit to it, Google SandBoxing was designed to filter out 'bad sites'. It has been widely noted by many SEOers that new sites have simply been denied or ignored by Google for a period of time until they prove they are legit. 3-6 months is the standard assumption. While it seems unfair and annoying it's become a sad reality in the attempt to combat spammers. Fly by night websites that set up to bring in traffic with totally irrelevant content have forced search engines to continually try to outsmart them. SandBoxing is a sad reality of this. 

So if your website is new and in the Google SandBox don't despair. Simply be patient and take the time to ensure your website is at it's best when it is allowed to come out and play. Build good incoming links, improve content, verify all links, check page load times. Spending that extra time ensuring you have a stellar website will go a long way in getting you the high rankings you'll be wanting.

Hint: If you're planning on a new website, get your domain name ASAP and submit it. Even if there is nothing on it, having the domain in the system could help move things along once your site is up and functional. Or purchase a pre-existing domain, one that's expired or being sold. As these are already being indexed by the search engines and will keep coming back looking for content.

Why does my Google search differ from my friends?

Google has several data centers housing its index . What occurs is often one data center does not return the same results as another. Someone searching for their keywords in LA will often have different results from someone searching for the same words in New York. 

A quote by PhilC at webworkshop sums it up nicely:

"Google has quite a few separate datacenters (DCs), each of which contain the entire index and the entire algorithms. For all intents and purposes, they are independent of each other. They don't all contain identical indexes, and they don't all contain identical algorithms (programs that do the rankings). It means that they often produce different results to each other.

When you do a search, you get the results from whatever datacenter Google chooses at that time. Unless you search a specific DC's IP address, Google chooses the DC to return the results from, and they choose it with every search you make, including when you click to get the next page of results. It's not uncommon for the next page of results to be provided by a different DC than the previous page of results."

Replacing your website and the duplication penalties

If your website is listed within the search engines well, you've accomplished quite a feat. Keeping it current and fresh often times involves a new layout or design altogether. Here you can run into problems.

1) If the new pages do not have the same 'name' or extension and the old pages which are indexed are removed then you could lose potential visitors who find you via an old link or listing.

2) If you keep the old pages as a 'gateway' into your website, people will find your site easily BUT search engines could/do penalize you for duplicate content; reasons being lack of original content, SPAMMING, plagiarism etc. Keep in mind spiders/indexers are simply piece of code designed to 'look' for certain things. You can't 'explain' to it what's going on. Or that your pages have simply changed names. It sees a duplication and flags it. That's what it's designed to do. It's job.

3) Search Engine spiders visit a now 'defunct' page, make the assumption that this site is no longer valid or available and lower it's credibility value accordingly.

So what should you do?

The simplest answer is keep the same page names whenever possible. Adding additional pages is no problem. They will be crawled the next time the spider comes visiting. If for some reason your site is designed with different page names but the same content, try to keep the old pages up for a short while, until the new pages have been visited, then remove them.

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