Got Sandboxed Using WordSniper Theme
Posted on January 25, 2008
Filed Under Internet Marketing, SEO, Wordpress |
So, I’ve been using Court’s Wordsniping techniques to target keywords.
This post is not to knock the concept, but to put a warning out to you guys to be careful. The KeywordSniping theme works, and in my case, it worked too well.
I selected a keyword that I don’t feel comfortable sharing. Not because I’m scared of the competition, but it isn’t a site I’d like to share publicly. Its taboo in nature, and this site is known by people I know in real life. I will however tell you a little about the keyword.
- Using WordTracker Free, it shows up as having 5182 searches.
- SEO Chat Keyword Difficulty Check: 50.58%
- Google has 1,400,000+ results
And lastly, it is 1 word, and a fairly common word at that.
I thought it was a great keyword to target. Not too hard, but a nice amount of traffic.
So I launched the blog about 1.5 weeks ago.
What happened:
The site got listed in 1 day.
- I used one other blog I run and linked it from there.
- Added the link to my signature in a forum I run.
In 3 days, I was on page 12.
In 6 days, I was page 6
- I started to generate backlinks. (Not ones I generated, which was nice)
In 8 days, I was high on page 4.
Woke up yesterday. Its no where to be found in the first 200 results.
Looks like I caught Google’s attention.
Looking back, I would have done three things differently.
- Vary my anchor text more. I think my variety of anchor text for my links wasn’t enough. Google may have considered it spam.
- Slow it down some at first. A one week old site on page four… I see why they noticed. I’ll move a little slower next time. I hadn’t expected the back links generated by other people. The link had be spread by people on my forum. The jump from page 12 to 6 in 3 days was unexpected.
- Reduce the usage of my keyword in the page content. I didn’t think I was over doing it, but maybe I did. 90% of the sites content was pictures. Out of 40 posts, only 2 were text only posts. But after running it through some sites that count keywords, I can see how it was overdone on some pages.
Well, Court says to never trust any SEO who hasn’t been banned from Google. The site is still indexed, but this is the first time Google has taken action against a site of mine. I learned a little from it, but I’m sad about the set back. I’m going to keep the blog going, make some changed, and see if Google’s restrictions expire.
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