I launched my site in September of 2009, I got rankings WAY too fast and got hit with a penalty by November. After working at it for about a year, I started getting rankings around January of 2011. yikes. Now the traffic is starting to flow in. The moral of the story. Don't get too much traffic too soon and don't be greedy.
How did you get rankings so fast that you got a penalty? (I don't want to do this, just curious. lol)
At that time I just started to get into social bookmarking and in a two week period I went from no inbound links to several thousand. :-? (We all make mistakes!) At my corporate job we spent about $10mm USD each year with Google, so I got to talk to their top engineers in the Enterprise Entertainment Division and they (quietly) told me about the "please forgive me" letter that you can write in Google Webmaster tools, which I had never heard about before becuase I never had needed. I wrote that letter and the traffic was unlocked within 1 week of them telling me that my case had been reviewed.
** Plus I run a large network of websites and I put links all over those sites to this new site. Google is now watching for links between sites on the same nameserver and/or IP address, so they discount those now. A few years ago this was a good way to get traffic to a new website, but now they don't count those on the same network.
Now I know don't set up no more than one website, per IP adrdess, for fear of any search engine thinking I am possibly spamming, or getting inbound links too fast.
wow, thanks for sharing I was actually thinking of creating a network of sites, not on same IP of course, but on same server Will that be dangerous?
They are actually all unique IPs, but very close to each other. I have sense gotten much different IPs and setup unique nameservers for each master site. My goal has always been to have moderate-traffic websites with 10,000 uniques per day instead of a lot of smaller ones with 500 uniques per day.
Good Grief, At least you finally came out of the sandbox. One of my friends site is very inconsistent in its position. some called it dancing. we wonder on what should we do about.
Good for you, you've learned. Getting that much in a short period of time is something Google watch out for. Slowly but surely. That's how to make it.
More good news, I just started slowly building inbound natural traffic from business associates and product suppliers and i've jumped up a good 20 points on several of the 200 keywords I'm going after.
I'm not that good when it comes to technical terms about traffic. May I ask you something what is an inbound natural traffic? What is the difference of it on the traffic that can you get on google?. Thanks just curious. =)
Inbound natural traffic is the same as Organic search traffic...so its the same thing as the organic traffic you can get with Google.
That is long time, good thing you got out from it. And yeah when you are getting backlinks you should be careful to avoid long term stay in Sandbox..
I don't think you got penalized by Google. I think that sometimes, Google likes to promote new sites unnaturally high in the rankings, then bring them back down again.