The sandbox rewards my competitors for my publicity

[stephenmunday]

*** Warning - Mini-rant ahead ***

Maybe I am just paranoid....

....but have a look at the Alexa stats graph attached. My site stats are the blue line. One of my competitors are the red line.

My site (as per sig) was launched in January and I have tried various PR methods which have resulted in it being featured in USA Today in February and as Cool Site of the Day two days ago.

Now it seems to me that since I have started publicizing my site and my visitor numbers have started to grow, my competitor has also been seeing a similar and parallel growth in traffic. It has made me consider that there might be a connection: I wonder if this is what happens:

- Ms. A sees cool site in USA Today / press release / elsewhere.
- Ms. A tells Mr. B about it, but can't remember the URL.
- Mr. B uses keywords to search for the site on say, Google.
- The site is sandboxed in Google, so he ends up visiting another similar site rather than the original one seen by Ms. A.

Now, to a certain extent, publicity for my product / service is always going to benefit my competitors as well, since the search engines allow users to easily find comparable sites, products and services. That is fine. I can live with that.

What bugs me is that the fact that Google does not list sites that are "too young" (or whatever the latest sandbox thinking is) means that I reap none of the knock on benefit of my own hard-won publicity, and instead it benefits my competitors.

[Dominic]

Our traffic jumps everytime one of our serps compeditors runs TV ads because we are #1 & #2 and they are #3. I think they need to advertise more.

[Old Welsh Guy]

This is where domain name selection is crucial. I know that keyword rich domain names are going to result in good anchor text in your backlinks, but there is always a price to pay for that! A domain name like tatart.com is much easier to remember and even if sandboxed, you would have appeared top for the search.

There really is more to consider in web marketing and marketing in general than pure rankings, and choosing a domain name is crucial. Especially if you are planning offline viral marketing campaigns. An agine delay makes sense, and for the moment will protect the SERP's from the switch after banned brigade.

[MattUK]

Maybe the traffic increases in your competitors site are just the natrual growth of his site? I don't hold too much confidence in Alexa rankings, they are too easily manipulated, sites where the webmaster has the Alexa toolbar installed seem to do pretty well ;-)

[yfs1]

Stephen -

I saw your cool site of the day (Japanese one I believe). How much traffic did you receive from that? One of my sites will soon be named Cool Site of the Day so I am curious what to expect.

Cheers

[Cricket]

IMHO...

Alexa ranking is virtually meaningless, so please don't spend even 5 seconds concerning yourself about it. The "rating" is 100% determined by how many clicks your site receives by people who have the Alexa toolbar installed.(the Alexa toolbar has "spyware" installed to track your usage and where you visit.) Since the Alexa is 100% powered by Google, it never gained popularity with the "average" user. The vast majority of users who have the toolbar installed are webmasters and other net related fields. The results were therefore not in line with reality. Webmasters would sit and click on their sites on an extremely regular basis to create artificial results. If you read through their "top" results, you'll notice that Alexa has even added a disclaimer explaining that the results may be "biased".

[john_loch]

It's not a good thing when that happens.. especially when you work hard for it.

It's been said that there is a way to bypass the 'sandbox'. Some wm's believe that adding a subdomain to an established (non-sandboxed) domain, then linking to it from the home page of the main site essentially bypasses the sandbox for that subdomain. You then place a redirect (moved temporarily) on the home page of the subdomain (which points to your sandboxed site). This is supposed to have the effect of telling G it's an extension of an established site, and should therefore not be 'sandboxed'.

The point of setting up the subdomain (rather than simply redirecting from a page within the established site) is to ensure that your own site/content appears in the SERPS rather than the home page of the main site etc.

I can't say one way or the other whether it would work for you, but it might be worth a thought. :)

-----
Edit: Also - in terms of Alexa.. it really is a pointless reference. Although Alexa ranking data is gathered from more than just the tool bar, it can easily be biased by emulating toolbar activity. You'd be wise to ignore Alexa rankings as a reliable reference.
-----

Cheers,

JL

[Old Welsh Guy]

Sorry, i my responce I totally ignored the Alexa crap as well, as I replied to the concept rather than the specifics of Alexa rankings, which is probably the worse rating you can get.

[Cricket]

Although Alexa ranking data is gathered from more than just the tool bar, it can easily be biased by emulating toolbar activity.

How are Alexa's traffic rankings determined?
Alexa Frequently Asked Questions (http://pages.alexa.com/exec/faqsidos/help/index.html?index=1)

Alexa's traffic rankings are based on the usage patterns of Alexa Toolbar users over a rolling 3 month period. A site's ranking is based on a combined measure of reach and pageviews. Reach is determined by the number of unique Alexa users who visit a site on a given day. Pageviews are the total number of Alexa user URL requests for a site. However, multiple requests for the same URL on the same day by the same user are counted as a single pageview. The site with the highest combination of users and pageviews is ranked #1.

Some Important Disclaimers
About Alexa Traffic Rankings (http://pages.alexa.com/prod_serv/traffic_learn_more.html)

"The traffic data are based on the set of Alexa users, which may not be a representative sample of the global Internet population. Known biases include (but are likely not limited to) the following:


Our users are disproportionately likely to visit alexa.com, amazon.com and archive.org, and traffic to these sites may be substantially overcounted.
The Alexa Toolbar works only with the Internet Explorer browser. Sites frequented mainly by users of other browsers will be undercounted. For example, the AOL/Netscape browser is not supported, which means that Alexa collects little data from AOL users, and our traffic to aol.com is likely lower than it would be for a more representative sample.
The Alexa Toolbar works only on Windows operating systems. Although a large majority of the Internet population currently used Windows, traffic to any sites which are disproportionately visited by users of other operating systems will be undercounted.
The rate of adoption of Alexa software in different parts of the world may vary widely due to advertising locality, language, and other geographic and cultural factors. For example, to some extent the prominence of Korean sites among our top-ranked sites reflects known high rates of general Internet usage in South Korea, but there may also be a disproportionate number of Korean Alexa users.
In some cases traffic data may also be adversely affected by our "site" definitions. With tens of millions of hosts on the Internet, our automated procedures for determining which hosts are serving the "same" content may be incorrect and/or out-of-date. Similarly, the determinations of domains and home pages may not always be accurate. When these determinations change (as they do periodically), there may be sudden artificial changes in the Alexa traffic rankings for some sites as a consequence.
The Alexa Toolbar turns itself off on secure pages (https: Sites with secure page views will be under-represented in the Alexa traffic data.
In addition to the biases above, the Alexa user base is only a sample of the Internet population, and sites with relatively low traffic will not be accurately ranked by Alexa due to the statistical limitations of the sample. Alexa's data come from a large sample of several million Alexa Toolbar users; however, this is not large enough to accurately determine the rankings of sites with fewer than roughly 1,000 total monthly visitors. Generally, Traffic Rankings of 100,000+ should be regarded as not reliable because the amount of data we receive is not statistically significant. Conversely, the more traffic a site receives (the closer it gets to the number 1 position), the more reliable its Traffic Ranking becomes.

[stephenmunday]

Yes, it is true that Alexa rankings / traffic details do not mean a whole lot. That said, it is an interesting coincidence the way that my competitor's site's popularity (even in a flawed tool) would mirror mine. I have seen no extra link activity or advertising from them.

My traffic growth has been entirely due to my own effort and the kindness of users who have passed on my site info to their friends. My only search engine friend at the moment is Yahoo, with MSN beginning to perk up a little.

Regarding keyword-rich domains, I think the one I chose (www.japanese-name-translation.com) is pretty good. The problem with being in the sandbox is that unless the user already pretty much knows the exact domain name, they will not find me in G at all.

I am not complaining about my competitor getting extra visitors because of the buzz caused by my site. What I am disappointed about is that G takes so long to credit a decent site that users (who think that G knows everything) end up not being able to find it and end up somewhere else.

It just seems like another penalty of the whole sandbox situation. It frustrates me as a site owner, but even from the user's point of view, it can't be good if they are going out to find a particular site and can't just because G decides it is not ready to go out and play with the big SERPs yet.

[yfs1]

Hey Stephen -

What kind of numbers did you see from your Cool Site of the Day listing (as above)

Cheers

[MattUK]

I've heard of sites 'faking' Alexa rankings in the short term when selling advertising in order drive the price they charge higher. They can either do tis by clicking themselves or buying bulk traffic.

[yfs1]

The most common thing is an Alexa Booster which can be had on eBay and everywhere else for $5

[noppid]

Let me think about this... You get publicity for free from a source and google doesn't put you to the top of the list for free too. Instead, there is what may be a paying customer first and you are upset?

Or, you didn't pay at all to google and you paid to advertise somewhere else and google don't put you number one and their number one and two listing, probably paying, are still first?

Well OMG!!! How could they do that to you?

I just don't understand how the obviousness of that escapes anyone before saying it?

[john_loch]

Hi Cricket,

Thanks for the Cut and Paste - though I daresay I read that quite a while ago. I've been told that there is more at play (whether beta or production I don't know) than just the toolbar - that the data is/will include samples from large ISP's proxy data. Who knows.. AOL ?

Either way, Alexa (and their TOS/Disclaimers etc) is dated and pointless for the most part.

Cheers,

JL

[mopacfan]

Ok, so how does one go about getting a site even considered for the USA today cool site of the day?

[crazyhorse]

Ok, so how does one go about getting a site even considered for the USA today cool site of the day?

Thats what i would like to hear as well, there was this live link in one of the posting before, about that second world war site. Should i email them? :rolleyes:

[stephenmunday]

Hi noppid. Yes, I can't complain too much about not getting freebie traffic. However, what I was trying to do is to bring to light another (perhaps unexplored) aspect of being in the sandbox. After all, when you set up a new site you want to drive visitors to it as quickly as possible to start getting business. So you pay for and ask for pubicity. Now, if G listed this new site in the SERPs after a reasonable period of time - say 3 or 4 weeks - then you, as the new site owner, would happily benefit from the buzz being created as a result of your efforts as people started looking for you through related keyword searches. Unfortunately, the sandbox means that at the very time you are seeking (and paying for) publicity to get things off the ground, you end up invisible on G - and your hardwon buzz benefits your (old, long-estblished) competitors. So in a way, you end up in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario when you are publicizing a new site: You can't not do it, but now (thanks to the sandbox effect) a lot of your effort and financial outlay can just end up helping your competitors without benefitting you.

[stephenmunday]

About the USA Today listing, see the thread I started here

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=10216

for the email address you need. I think there were two forum members who ended up getting listed when they tried. It is definitely worth emailing.

[Solicitors Mortgages]

it seems that the best option is wait until you are out of the sandbox
BEFORE you start a publicity campaign......

however.....

most people haven't even heard of the sandbox until they type
WHERE THE F*CK HAS MY SITE GONE, or something similar, into google

good luck with your site when you get out,
which means you have 6 months to work on link building and surfin' :)

[stephenmunday]

Well, I have IBLs to thank for most of the traffic I get at the moment. Maybe I should have held off on the publicity, but (as you say) I was not aware of the sandbox until I was in it. On the other hand, fortunately G stumbled onto a beta version of my site last September, so it has already been aware of it for six months. Hopefully that means that the end is near ...... :)