And I don’t mean girls in Google-brand bikinis on the beach, duking it out. Mmmm…

What I’m talking about here is the terrible, almighty Google, deciding that your site needs to stand in the corner for a 1-month timeout because it wasn’t playing well with others. Yes. That’s right. The Google Sandbox and Google filtering that everyone secretly fears, but publicly dismisses. How do I know about this? Because I recently fell victim to it. Although it was completely my fault, I’ve since learned from it, and now I’m sharing my tips here, so that hopefully other developers and SEOs can learn from my mistake of building inbound links too quickly.

A few weeks ago, I started doing SEO for a new site. The site has a good age - 1998 - plenty of keyword-rich (but not spammy) original content, and absolutely no inbound links. Well… actually it had 3. Exactly 3. No more, no less. We redeveloped the site with the same template on a temporary domain, which oddly enough started ranking on pages 1 and 2 for several of our keywords - before we even launched the real domain! We thought “Sweet Momma! We must be doing something right.”

After we make the *new* site live, I begin to start working on SEO. Luckily the site is running Wordpress, so basic SEO is easy. I setup clean, keyword inclusive, and distinguished Title tags. Meta tags. Make sure SEO URLs are in place. Make sure Alt tags are in place. Generated sitemap and submitted to Google Webmasters (+Analytics), Yahoo Site Explorer, and Microsoft Webmaster Central. Create a Links page. And get at it building inbound links. One thing I like to do with new sites, is sometimes purchase some text links from Text-Link-Ads.com; this often gives a great boost to already live sites, and some of my sites are now ranking on page 1 in Google for more than a dozen of their keywords, and seeing tremendous amounts of traffic as a result. Great! I head on over, purchase some ads and think all is well. And it is… for about a week.

In fact, it was completely amazing. I was stoked! The site shot to page 1 for the majority of it’s keywords and even some that we hadn’t even evaluated or thought of. Really general keywords were ranking well too. For our main keyword (the one I used in all of the TLAs) we were #2. Sweet. Huge boost in traffic! Then BAM! We drop like Goliath. For our main keyword, especially - gone. Completely. Problem? I bought lots of site-wide links through TLA. I used the same anchor text for all of the ads. And all of the ads went live within the same 2 days.

Google: Hi, Nick?

Nick: Oh hey Google! What’s up?

Google: You’ve got way too many links in the last week. You smell like spam. We need you to… umm… go away.

Nick: Oh… umm… okay? Can I come back later?

Google: Umm… maybe. In like a month?

Comic gratuitously and maliciously stolen without mercy from: ToonRefugee

Remember your first heartbreak from your first love? Yeah… it was something like that. And boy do I love Google and search engine optimization. This still hurt. But it’s okay, because you always learn from it and move on to bigger and better things. And eventually, you’ll run into her again… Accept with Google, I know the site will be back… at least I hope with great confidence.

I’ve been doing some research and read some good information (and a lot of really bad information as well) over on the Digital Point Forums. There are a lot of really smart guys who have been in the business for a long time. In fact, some of the industry gurus such as Aaron Wall and Matt Cutts have accounts over there. Aaron actually has a good post about this exact topic - building links too quickly. Apparently, and logically, Google has a filter for sites that appear to build inbound links too quickly. They’ve even temporarily banned one of their own sites it seems. At least they know the filter works… I guess?

So here is a quick guide based on the information that I’ve gathered over the last few weeks. I will definitely be using this from here on out for new websites.

• Try to control the speed of new incoming links. They should be natural/organic links.

• Start building incoming links through link exchange sites, social networking, bookmarking, etc.

• After a few weeks of *natural* link building, purchase some low PageRank links & then gradually higher PageRank links. TLA offers blog posts, perfect for this.

• Don’t purchase site-wide links right away. Wait a month or two. SEO is an ongoing process… most people don’t understand that.

• Limit the outbound links on the site. Use ‘nofollow’ if necessary, unless linking to high quality sites (Wikipedia, CNN, Adobe, anyone reputable).

• Don’t do reciprocal link exchanges if possible. Or limit them greatly. It’s your links page - you can be picky.

• Yahoo doesn’t appear to be quite as picky, but still be careful.

Oddly enough after all of that, we are still ranking exceptionally well in Yahoo. All keywords are on page 1 or two of results. But sadly that doesn’t mean much - Yahoo just ‘ain’t what it used to be’ and doesn’t even produce a third of the results that Google does.

So what was the biggest problem with this situation? IT. DID. NOT. LOOK. NATURAL. Having 4800 new links pointing to one of your pages all within a week does not look natural to Google. I don’t blame them. It wasn’t natural, unless it was social bookmarking related. But even then, the backlinks won’t always be the same source. Many of you will probably read this and say “Duh. Idiot. STFU and GTFO!” and all I can do is hang my head in shame. I just got a little over-zealous with my link-building techniques - both natural and unnatural. But now I know. And knowing is half the battle.

If you have similar experience, tips, or questions, feel free to leave some comments and start a dialogue. Communication is always encouraged.