I have spent a lot of time reading search engine tricks and techniques. During this time one thing that kept reappearing is the idea of a sandbox mode. I wanted to experiment with driving traffic to a few sites through expert links so I decided to create a blog. I chose Google’s Blogger tool hoping that somehow it would give me a boost to Google rankings or a higher PR from that link.
I set up my blog Everything Ecommerce on December 17th. After setting up the site I then went around and submitted it to the major search engines, and began commenting on other blogs in order to increase the number of inbound links. I also noticed on the Blogger account tools a link to have ads by Google on your site. After completing the registration processes my site was approved for the Google ads in only 1 hour. That was something that really caught my eye. I had previously submitted sites that I wanted to run Google’s ads on and the approval process took much longer.
Next I setup the Google AdWords code on my site and began seeing public service announcement ads. I expected this since Google’s documentation stated that these ads are shown until GoogleBot is able to index the site and present relevant ads. In just a few hours of time from adding my first post my site began to show advertisements based on the content of my site.
I was stunned to have targeted ads showing up so soon so I did a search in the Google Tool bar for “everything ecommerce” without the quotes. My site came up #2 out of 1,840,000! Not too bad for a day’s worth of work and no real site optimization, just relevant content related to my site title and address. Within 2 weeks from the site going live the site is now #1 for searches on everything ecommerce. I doubted that I will receive any traffic from such a bizarre key word phrase, but I used it to just test if my site was indexed or not.
This little experiment has taught me a couple of interesting things.
1. If there is a sandbox it can be circumvented by the use of Google AdWords on the site.
2. Content is king. Well written content optimized for your target audience will deliver search results. I try to stress this to my clients; it was nice to see it working in practice.
3. Google still loves blogs. With their continually updated content and relevant long tail text, they are a great resource for bringing targeted traffic to your site.
4. Traffic comes from the strangest places. Looking at my referrers, I found 6 entries for Google searches of Everything Britney Spears.
This is just the start of what I hope to accomplish with my blog. Over the next few months I will be actively trying to enhance its PR and incoming links. I hope that this will then raise the commercial sites that I am really trying to promote. Whatever the results, I’ll be sure to keep you updated.
By Joshua Wood