YES. Though it is probably not a single filter it is more likely to be a combination of aging filters that prevent new websites from instantly ranking for competitive search terms. I know this because I have experienced it with several websites. This is also the reason why big SEO firms tend to shy away from optimising websites that are less than a year old. Let me explain a couple of my experiences.

The first time I experienced it was when I was building reciprocal links for Glass Block Outlet back in 2004. When I did an allinanchor: search in Google for the search terms I had been targeting (“Glass Blocks”, “Glass Block”, “Glass Bricks”, “Glass Brick”) the website was ranking top 10 but in the real search results I was 300+. Once the site reached about 9-10 months old it jumped straight into the top 10. Nothing had changed.

The AffiliStore website was created back in December 2006 and each of the scripts that visitors downloaded and created websites with had footer links targeting the AffiliStore website with either the brand term “AffiliStore” or the more competitive term “Affiliate Marketing”. Obviously there was no problem ranking for “AffiliStore” as no one else was really targeting that search term (apart from a few affiliates who blogged about the scripts) but, as with Glass Block Outlet, the site was ranking top 15 for “allinanchor:Affiliate Marketing” but 300+ in the real search results. This time there was thousands of one way incoming links which also included some nice PR4-5 links from popular affiliate related blogs but again it took until November 2007 for the site to jump from 300+ to top 15 in Google for “Affiliate Marketing”.

Now it seems to me that there is an aging filter which says “If this site is less than 6-12 months old and has incoming links targeting competitive search terms, then dump it down to 300+ in the rankings.” I also know that the longer an incoming link is in place the more it will benefit your website. I’ve heard (but not experienced) that getting a link from an authoritative website, for example the BBC, with your anchor text targeting the competitive term will kick your site out of this sandbox effect. This would make sense as Google is about providing users with the best experience so if a website such as the BBC is recommending your website for a search term then you must be providing a good resource.

Another way of getting around the sandbox effect with a new domain is to use a domain name that contains the exact search terms. So for example if I had just bought affiliatemarketing.co.uk I would have a lot less hassle trying to rank my site for “Affiliate Marketing” through building links. But these domain names are very hard to come by as they have been snapped up years ago.

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I’ve got the latest version of SMF (Simple Machines Forum) running on my AffiliStore website and have been using this for over a year now. I’ve had a strange problem in that Google seems to refuse to index the topic (post) pages. If you do a site: search on the AffiliStore forum you will find that it has indexed and cached all the member profile pages and a few other irrelevant bits of junk but no topic pages.

I decided to do a search on Google to see if anyone else has had the same problems and sure enough it seems that this is common amongst SMF users. Now the surprising thing is that when you go to the SMF main website and do a site: search on their community forum, Google seems to be listing their entire topic pages fine, so they seem to be blind to the problem even though people have posted about it in their forum.

Now I’ve looked into it quite a bit, checked the script to see if Googlebot is being blocked somewhere, removed a noindex meta tag which probably wasn’t doing too much harm as it only showed on certain pages you wouldn’t want indexed, tried the rewrite URLs option for a couple of months which again didn’t index topic pages and the rewrote URLs were very poor (along the lines of /forum/index.php/topic,72.0.html – that is just garbage) but the only conclusion I can come up with so far is that unless my server is somehow blocking SMF topic pages then Google doesn’t like the topic page URL format (/forum/index.php?topic=363.0 – is the . before the 0 causing a problem, surely not?).

So now I am trying a couple of other options, because I do love SMF compared to other forums as it is really user friendly and has loads of options. Firstly, I have now added the latest topic posts on the main pages of the AffiliStore website which should guarantee these pages being indexed as they have been brought to within one link of the top level of the website. I have also added a sitemap mod which creates regular forum sitemap and a sitemap.xml which I have uploaded to Google’s Webmaster Tools.

The next step is to just sit it out and wait to see if the above actions finally get the SMF topic pages indexed in Google. I’m not going to give up on SMF as v2 is just round the corner and I’m sure it will be even better than the current version, but it is frustrating as I do have a couple of thousand topic posts that should be bringing in lots of visitors for various longtail search terms.

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It has been a while since I last submitted one of my own websites to Yahoo! Directory but recently I have decided to splash out the $299 on New Football Kits to help push it’s rank for some of the more competitive search phrases such as “Football Kits”, “Football Boots” and “Football Shirts”.

The last site I submitted to Yahoo! Directory was Glass Block Outlet back in 2005 and I instantly noticed the benefits in Yahoo! search engine rankings for targeted search terms and I also think it was one of the deciding factors that pushed the website to the number 1 position in Google.co.uk for the search term “Glass Blocks” (which also helped the site get a listing on the BBC website).

Now people may argue that things have changed since then but recently I have worked on a number of websites which have very poor on page SEO and minimal incoming links but still manage to rank in Yahoo! search results for terms they have no right to. This is solely because they have a Yahoo! Directory listing.

So I have been monitoring the positions of New Football Kits for these popular search terms and the current results are:

The Yahoo! Directory listing should hopefully go live over the next few days so I will report back with the rankings in a month from now which should be enough time for the site to benefit from the listing.

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Here is a simple way to create a download counter script using PHP. It simply counts each click on the download link and stores the result in a writable text file.

First upload the file you wish users to download to your server. Then create a text file and name it “counter.txt“. Open the text file and add a 0, save and upload to your server and set the text file permissions to 777.

Now create a PHP file named “countdownloads.php” and add the following code:

<?php
$myFile = "counter.txt";
$fh = fopen($myFile, 'r');
$theData = fread($fh, filesize($myFile));
fclose($fh);

$theData = $theData + 1;

$myFile = "counter.txt";
$fh = fopen($myFile, 'w') or die("can't open file");
fwrite($fh, $theData);
fclose($fh);

header("Location: download.zip");
?>

Now add the following code to your HTML page that will display the link to your download:

<p><a href="countdownloads.php">Download File</a><br />
<?php
$myFile = "counter.txt";
$fh = fopen($myFile, 'r');
$theData = fread($fh, filesize($myFile));
echo $theData;
fclose($fh);
?> Downloads<br />
since Feb 2008</p>

Upload these files to the same directory on your server and that should do the trick. I’m using this script on AffiliStore to count the downloads of the software.

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Hello and welcome, bal4.co.uk is the online portfolio and web blog of Accessible Web Designer and Search Engine Optimisation Consultant Steven Balfour.

This websites details services which I can provide either through hiring me on a freelance contract or as an employee. For details about projects I have previously worked on please view my about me page.

I am currently working self employed as an Affiliate Marketer earning commissions through a variety of product based websites focused in various sectors. I have previously worked as a Senior Web Designer and as a SEO Executive and have successfully developed and marketed websites for both SMEs and large companies/organisations.

As this blog develops it will contain details of projects that I am working on, coding and design tips that I pick up along the way, search engine optimisation techniques which bring results and details of how to successfully market websites through various channels.

If you are interested in any of my services then please use the contact me form and I will reply to your query asap.

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