Vitaliy Gershfeld

Parasite SEO is just another term for placing your website link on high traffic sites that Google loves so they will send you link juice and boost rankings.

But does this strategy work? 

It can if used correctly, but often, the very term “parasite” gives people who first hear about it the wrong impression and usually that wrong impression leads them to do the wrong things to get their site either no boost in rankings or an SEO penalty. 

There is a right way to do it, and I will show you it.

Parasite SEO (PS) explained more in-depth.

The most common and misinterpreted theory behind this strategy is that you “simply” post your website links on specific websites (High traffic sites) and through doing so, those sites send you a lot of traffic back, which then Google sees and interprets that your website must be some sort of catch to rank higher, and so they do.

This gives website owners the impression (the wrong one) that they don’t really need to focus on building up their website and that they can instead just head out, post a few links to their site/s on forums, other high traffic blogs (leaving a comment with their website link) and just site back and enjoy the link juice that comes from it.

In reality, the odds of this primitive approach to SEO isn’t going to get you anywhere. And like I said, there is also the chance that it can be done in such a wrong way, that penalties occur to your website.

See an example of how incorrectly this is talked about on this Quora post on PS. They make it sound like it’s a simple process of just linking and reaping the rewards, it’s simply not…

This is where I have 2 major warnings about this strategy:

1) This isn’t a cheat to boost rankings.

It’s often misinterpreted as such. The very way I just explained it above is how most people understand this subject, and then predictably, they think they can easily get rankings and this makes them engage in the wrong strategies. 

2) You can’t focus too much on using this method, because…

The core to SEO success does not lie with this, but it lies with focusing on your site’s content creation and waiting for the sandbox period to end. The problem with PS is that it gives people the impression that it’s the other way around, and that ends up making them do one or two things:

A) They end up being lazy, not posting content on their site (which inevitably is what makes the site fail). Trust me, when people hear and think that they don’t need to work so much on their site and can post a few links to get rankings, most of the time, they WILL do it.

B) Or they focus too much on posting links in places where they will never ever get approved, so it’s empty work that produces no results, and they are left with no valuable links and no site to “feed off” through this method.

The truth is that you shouldn’t try to leech off other sites (They probably won’t let you).

This is the core problem behind PS and the way people think about it. Believe me, NO website is ever going to let someone they don’t know leech off their rankings and traffic. 

Anyone who has a high ranking site and good traffic understands how difficult it is to reach that level of SEO and you can bet money that these people would never allow some stranger to just come in, leave a comment with their URL in it (a form of PS) and just funnel traffic from the said site to theirs, not unless they are someone the website owner KNOWS. 

Now some people make the claim that PS success comes from posting links on social media and other similar sites, but I say that this is often a useless tactic for 2 reasons: 

1) It is totally fine to make your own social media pages that funnel traffic to your site, but they start off empty and you need to build them up so they become known, and THEN you can leverage them for rankings.

See my social media SEO post here to understand how that works.

2) Some people suggest finding popular social media pages with large communities and posting your link on their page, in hopes that the large community will see that link and click it (again, this is all parasite SEO examples).

But folks, this is spam and spam never gets approved by any decent social media page, because they don’t want their page to become sullied with people who do this, and any community page on social media that allows this to happen quickly dies out.

So in other words, good pages with PS potential in this context, won’t allow you to leech off them.

When PS really works, 2 scenarios:

There are a few circumstances in which this approach works, but what you will find is that in order to even get to these points, you will need to EARN it and like I said earlier, there is no cheating your way to this point, it WILL take hard work:

1) Your site through legitimate SEO strategies, becomes well ranked (see tips) and earns traffic.

You use this traffic, create social media pages or email lists and then build communities off these things. In the process you become your own “leech” in a way because you don’t rely on any other channels or places to link back to you. You already possess them through working hard on your site.

2) Through the process of building your site and it’s rankings through #1, you become well known by others who also possess their own communities and followings.

Then when you are known by these people and trusted by them, they will allow you to share your site and “leech” off them, and odds are, they will ask you to do the same and this can occur through things like guest blog posts or promoting each other on your sites.

So as you can see, in it’s most legitimate approach, parasite SEO is nearly impossible to succeed at if you follow the traditional way of doing it. Instead, you have to acknowledge that this cheap way of getting rankings is usually met with failure.

How can I tell if a PS strategy is legit:

Since there are many forms of using this strategy, I’m going to give you a special tutorial to help you figure out if the PS strategy you’re thinking of using will work or not.

First, understand that in it’s essence, you’re simply trying to get your website link out on websites that get a lot of traffic and you hope that in doing so, that the masses will see this link, click it and give you link juice. 

Based on this, the bigger the link juice the better the rankings. Now I also refer to this as “backlinking” and it literally is the same thing. In other words:

PS = Backlinking.

So based on that explanation, read this guide I wrote. In there I detail how to identify the value of a backlink based on it’s context and it all comes down to identifying if it brings you link juice or not.

• If it doesn’t, forget it.
• If it does, use it.

I assure you that within 5 minutes after reading that article, you’re going to turn into an expert on everything regarding backlinks, link juice and PS, because it is all based on the same concept.

Doing SEO full time, for years, has taught me many lessons. I’ve experienced the success and the horror it can bring, but it’s still worth it, to me. 

Will that be the case for you? Will you be on the success or failure side?

Well that’s dependent upon your ambition to succeed in it and being prepared to face the likelihood that it won’t work or produce fast enough results. 

I’m not trying to tell you to not embark on this trip, but I am going to explain that it has it’s bumps, big ones at times, that can truly shatter your ambition instantly at times, which happened to me multiple times, and that’s on the negative end.

On the positive end though, this business is highly in demand, not just from a point of view of you making websites, getting organic traffic and making good money (which I have also experienced multiple times), but being a valued in demand professional in the field, who clients are ready to pay big money to in order to get their sites and potential businesses to do the same. 

You can make more as a professional or at least intermediately experienced in this field than most major job titles pay in the world, that is NOT a joke.

How much can you make with SEO? These are my real numbers:

My history with SEO & real stories of failure and success.

While I have made a lot of sites since I started, I don’t want to list all of them. Instead, I want to breakdown my history with SEO into 3 phases, each of which started well but ended because the rules changes or I did something I shouldn’t have. 

When I would move into the next phase of my experience, I did so knowing what past mistakes NOT to repeat and that actually made the progressing of my phases better and better. 

My first phase of success (and eventual failure):

I began an SEO career writing articles on directories. At the time, writing a short, 300 or more word essay on any topic that had profitability produced me fast, high rankings and sales.

This was a method I milked for about a year, having daily sales that went from $20-$200 at times. And I grossed $10,000’s of dollars in the process.

But this eventually died out and the standards rose and neither I nor anyone who used that approach could do it any longer, because this business evolved, a lot.

This meant that I would need to evolve how I did SEO or quit and frankly, this was one of the biggest hits I took. Think about how easy it was to write short little blog posts and get high rankings, and make easy money.

You get used to doing this after awhile and imagine yourself being set for life. But once the hit comes, ALL of that fell apart, those daily profits disappeared.

This would be the first of many hard lessons I was taught about how tough this business because of how it changes (it was the first of many changes I experienced). But whining about it certainly wouldn’t pay my bills. If I wanted to continue, I would have to evolve and try harder. 

This led me to create personal websites where the norm for content increased dramatically. From the 300 or so words I was able to get by before, I now had to reach over a 1,000, on every single one. Not only that, but standards rose in more than just word count, I had to create better content, better links and more.

But being that I already tasted the success within this world, I knew it was worth it and so I did meet the standards. And I did see success.

But then another crash happened, Phase 2 (I tried to cheat):

During my second phase of SEO attempts, while I did have some success, I tried to take a shorter path to reaching it, by engaging in very poor backlinking strategies, which in hindsight, I warn people to avoid, due to them being in the red, danger zone. 

But at the time, I didn’t know what I know now and in doing what I did, every site that I managed to get successful through crashed. Just as my first stage of SEO crashed, so did this one and in all honesty, it was short lived. I only made a few $100 from this.

The 3rd phase (where I’m at now):

Prelude: Putting in a lot of work during the second phase and then having it ALL be destroyed nearly overnight put me in a bit of a depression. Again, just with the first phase, putting in the work, seeing the results and then having it all go back down to zero can really mess with your mind.

However, being that the second phase failure wasn’t the first time I experienced such a thing, I managed to bounce back from it faster, because I knew what I did wrong, and I knew what I had to do in order to fix this and continue.

The only issue was…I had to start over. And that was my biggest struggle to overcome at the time.

Again, I asked myself if SEO was worth it, and then I remembered all the profits I had experienced in the past, the potential I saw and experienced personally. I had an action plan to reach this goal, and I knew that I could no longer cheat my way to success.

If I was going to make my 3rd attempt at succeeding at this work, I would need to truly sit my butt down and work for a long time. And I truly did that.

This hard work and effort was what led to the $200k+ generated.

While my first half year working hard produced little results, thanks to the Google Sandbox, eventually I realized that this is how SEO works and being persistent during that waiting period, I was able to bear fruit in ALL the efforts I put into the new sites I made that truly followed the white hat rules of getting by in this business. 

That occurred in early 2013. And being that 2019 is less than a month away (Update: This article was updated in mid 2019), I’m here to tell you, the rules I’ve been following for nearly 6 years still stand, have not killed ANY of my sites that I have followed through with this one and there’s no sign this will stop. 

While I had to work A LOT harder than I did during the first 2 phases, the end result was what truly made it all worth it.

3 lessons I want you to take from my experience (if this is worth it to you):

1) You will have to write a lot.

Content is king in modern day SEO. If you wish to survive in this world, content creation is what will drive you to success. If you are not a writer and don’t enjoy it, you have no business getting into all of this stuff.

You have to consider that the average person may take several hours just to produce just 1 blog post. Then you will have to consider that these efforts will need to be multiplied by 100x at least to get to a point where you can get enough traffic to make enough money to make this a livelihood. 

Promoting local businesses is a little bit different (here is how it works) and does require less work, but I’m personally not a local businessman, I’m a person making his own blog and so are most people, so they will have to aim for that main goal.

2) You will need patience. 

That Google Sandbox I told you about is a real killer of ambition and one of the reasons people think SEO is dead. Not only do you have to get over the hump of writing a lot, but then waiting for that work to produce results, over a period of months usually can really kill your determination. 

The important thing here is to be aware of this sandbox and know that it WILL affect you no matter who you are and that it’s fine to go through it. You just have to keep focusing on the first lesson while you’re waiting.

You only need to get through the sandbox period once, then all your future work will be ranked faster.

3) Just because you get free traffic doesn’t mean it’ll get you money.

Once you pass that sandbox hump, you will be very happy to see a spike in traffic, but it won’t always mean that you’re set and the money will start pouring in.

Out of the few people who actually get to this point in SEO, there’s also a minority within this minority who get the profits right away. You have to understand how to get sales from visitors and how to monetize your site and you have to TEST different sales angles and that bears it’s own training.

Here’s an extra tip that will solve most of these problems…

As you can see there are a lot of obstacles in SEO and while I am hopeful you will see how worth it can really be, there’s a lot of expected problems when you begin. And if you expect them, you’ll be fine.

That is why I have this following tip to minimize these obstacles for you:

If I haven’t scared you away from trying this business, then try that program above and I promise you, with added ambition, you can be where I am in this business.

The Google disavow tool was created to combat people trying to send toxic links to other sites to damage their SEO rankings. That is what it is.

And while the very thought of someone trying to sabotage your site with bad links may be on your mind right now, I have to say that not only has this scenario become nearly impossible to happen (if you follow certain rules), but the very tool itself may not even be necessary to have or worry about using.

That’s right, an SEO expert just told you not to worry about bad links or using the disavow option. And before you close this page and head over to others which say the complete opposite of what I’m saying, give me a chance to PROVE to you that my position on this tool is the right one.

Read this article first and then tell me I’m wrong.

Why the Google disavow option even exists in the first place:

Backlinking USED to be a very serious and important part of SEO and by used to, I mean MANY years ago. In short…

• If you’d get good links coming to your site, you’d get good rankings.
• And if you got bad links coming to your site, you’d get a penalty from Google and bad rankings. 

In regards to the bad links, this eventually became a weapon that people used against each other’s sites, since they didn’t want competition.

And a site which was ranking well, upon receiving an influx of bad links, would have it’s SEO crash, very quickly sometimes. This became known as negative SEO. 

Since this became a very widespread problem, Google invented the disavow option which basically allowed any webmaster to fight back against bad backlinks coming into it.

How the disavow tool works:

First, you must examine a list of backlinks coming into your site. There’s specific programs for that stuff, including Webmaster tools.

Next, you must distinguish which of those links are toxic and bad.

Then and only then can you take the list of the bad links, put them into this tool and tell Google to disavow them which basically means, ignore them and not let them affect your site’s ranking.

Here is a link to the actual page where Google explains how it works and it also warns against using it, because of it’s complexities (which basically come down to understanding how to distinguish backlinks from the good and bad ones). Here’s what it looks like:

It’s a useful option, so why am I telling you not to worry about using it?

Because the period in which this was truly necessary is no longer the problem it once was. Yes, there’s still LOTS of people seeking to destroy each other using this method, but…

That actual sabotage method of sending bad links to other sites has itself been disavowed by Google. 

Google was very smart to recognizing the trend years ago when this was a truly serious issue and they took massive steps to update their algorithm to correct this problem and in the process, they basically disavowed ALL backlinks, good and bad in the process, without you having to worry about it.

So what does this mean for good backlinks? Well the actual process has greatly evolved and the value placed in the actual link is now worth 0 in Google’s eyes.

Do NOT misinterpret this as meaning backlinks are worthless, they are NOT. Here is how they have evolved and how you SHOULD be using them the right way.

And what does this mean for bad backlinks? Well it now means that no matter how many people, send however many bad backlinks to your site, it will still mean 0 for the SEO impact it has. 

Ok, that’s a problem right? Well if you believe in bad backlinks harming your site, then it is. So what do you do if you believe it’s a problem?

You’d go through the process and basically tell Google to ignore those 1,000 backlinks.

Now you should be fine, until the same person or someone else comes around and tries to do this whole sabotage thing all over again.

And as long as you keep believing in this being a problem, you’re going to have to keep using the disavow option again and again to counter these attacks.

What I’m getting at here is that this process can truly become a loop and no matter how many times you combat it, someone, somewhere will still come around and will still try to negatively hurt your site with this approach.

It just seems like a foolish process where someone innocent has to constantly tell and prove to Google that they are innocent, while the bad guys keep throwing these bad things at them over and over and in my opinion, this system favors the bad guys.

Unless you consider what I just said about the whole evolution of backlinks, in which case, the process flips and the bad guys, no matter how hard they try can’t hurt your site with this approach no longer.

If this is true, then why are so many SEO experts saying otherwise? 

I have to say that while looking over this topic on other websites that talk about SEO, most of them have said the complete opposite of what I said here. 

• They still believe in backlinks playing a very important role in SEO.
• They still believe in people sabotaging competing websites through sending them toxic backlinks.
• They still believe a site owner needs to be careful and be ready to use the disavow option and even hire people to do it for them.

My personal opinion on this matter is that many SEO experts are honestly out of touch with the way the model has evolved. 

I truly believe that you are protected from this form of negative SEO thanks to how Google has evolved it’s view of it.

As long as you do these following things, you will not even need to worry about the tool:

It is through these 3 specific methods that people get their bad backlinks onto your site and hurt it. Otherwise, if these 3 things are correctly maintained, it doesn’t matter if a tsunami of bad backlinks are trying to hurt your site, they will not succeed.

Again, I urge you to read these 2 following articles:

1) This is probably the most important article you’ll ever read on backlinks, which proves how Google has basically disavowed both good and bad ones altogether and how you can still get good ones if you know how to identify which are really good.

2) And second, you have to understand that negative SEO has different forms and classifications and each has it’s own counter system to stopping. Read this article and you’ll understand how your site can truly be harmed by negative SEO and how to reverse it if it ever happens.

What to do after you use the disavow tool:

Generally speaking after using it, your site’s rankings should start to climb overtime on it’s own. A disavow tool is basically going to clear your site from the bad link/s that were plaguing it, but the recovery time after this happens varies.

To speed it up or optimize it, use these SEO techniques to help that process.

An SEO penalty from Google sucks. I’ve had it happen to 3 sites I’ve owned in the past. But, it’s possible to recover from this, let’s go over how.

One of the main things people absolutely need to understand is that SEO penalties from Google happen for generally these following reasons:

The ability to understand which of those specific things your page is responsible for doing and correcting it is what will lead to the recovery of the said page as each of those reasons above has their own manual action you can take to correct it.

The problem is that most people who engage in those activities don’t even understand that they are bad and when their site gets hit, they are lost as to why. Well at least now you have the main reasons on why this occurs.

I’ll go over the basic corrections for those issues below, but before we do that, let’s be absolutely sure your page is indeed suffering from an SEO penalty and not just a regular drop or fluctuation in rankings which happens to every single website (see the top 10 reasons), which is normal…

How to check if Google penalized my website:

If you notice your page or pages are losing traffic, rankings and so on, the question is, how much traffic and rankings is it losing? If you’re getting 10%-20% less traffic, it may be a period where something causes your audiences to forget looking up your page. It could even be (and likely is) a Google dance.

Another thing that might be happening is that a Google update (like this) has occurred during which MANY websites go through a ranking turmoil and if you give it a few weeks, it should subside. 

In short, if you’re experiencing a loss in rankings, that are around losing 1-10 spots on a particular page in the search results, that is not something I’d be concerned about as generally algorithm changes (and that dance I mentioned) are responsible for this, and it doesn’t go on for long, before your rankings go back to the way they were. You may need to give that a few days or even several weeks to know for sure. 

Now if you are experiencing a 50% or more loss of traffic and/or several pages of lower rankings (or none at all), then it’s time to raise the red flag and see what’s going on…

Note: If you’re not familiar with how to check for this stuff, I wrote a tutorial on how to check your keyword rankings on Google.

How do you check for a Google penalty? The tools that work:

So there’s specific SEO tools for this, including ones from places like Moz and other sources. I have an article here that links to 6 supposedly good ones, but I have to be honest, I haven’t personally used any of them.

What I do know works well is Google’s own service that is designed for this specific problem. It is called the Manual Actions Report (link included to the page).

You will find that this particular page has a button you can press, and then submit your site through which will produce a report on how your site is doing, if indeed there was/is a penalty taking place, and with that diagnostic tool, you’ll be able to at least pinpoint where the exact issue/s are coming from:

From there, you’ll be able to take the right actions, and then re-submit your site to be reviewed and hopefully recover from the penalty.

Now it is important to note that in order to use this service, you will need to have a Webmaster Tools account. With that, at least you’ll have a more direct connection with the service and it’ll help you speed up the recovery process of your page.

A more manual/advanced method of spotting penalties:

Once you have a Webmaster Tools account set up (remember, you need this to make all of this work), you will need to go into it, visit the page you verified within there, and then look at the following things:

Now the red areas I circled are what you would want to look at as soon as you suspect your page is suffering from a Google penalty. In those sections, you will be told (if there is an issue) what’s going on. 

Now I also include the yellow areas because you may very well see these same things one of my sites is, and panic that a penalty is headed your way. In this case, it’s not, because in the following situation, the “errors” or “coverage issues” message I’m getting are not a big deal and do not fall into the 10 main issues I listed above.

Sometimes I’ll want to prevent any search engine indexing and ranking to happen on a page I have for personal reasons and the fact that it won’t be able to access it, it will still let me know there’s an issue, but it’s not one that will cause SEO dangers.

So don’t worry about things like:

Crawl errors: If you don’t let Google index a certain page or post, this is a message you can disregard. Only worry about that if there’s a 404 error page (in my case, it’s not an issue).

DNS, server connectivity. Sometimes your page’s hosting goes down, and it may be during a time that Google’s spiders are checking out your page. And when it does this, it’ll turn up an error, and let you know that, “hey, we checked your page and it’s not up, you should fix this ASAP”.

This happens to everyone, and when your hosting resumes and everything comes back, Google will see that and it’ll be fine. Once again, you can disregard this, unless you have bad hosting (in which case, upgrade it because bad hosting can lead to too many fetching errors).

Messages which say “new coverage issues detected”. Webmaster will notify you of any coverage problems, but like I said, they aren’t a big deal, worry about the red flag ones.

Also Webmaster Tools sends you notifications and emails with warnings about all these things beforehand, so by having this account, you can preemptively stop a penalty from happening (but I suspect you’re past that point if you’re reading this).

Taking the action to recover from the penalty:

Once you’ve identified the exact issue or issues that have caused the SEO penalty to occur, it’s time to take the necessary actions. This is where, the first step would be to again go back to the manual actions report page I linked above:

What you want to do is see which particular issue is causing your page to be punished, and to see the fix for the said problem. Followed by that, you have to take these following actions:

1) Manually correct the error/s and/or hire someone for this.

2) Resubmit your sitemap to Webmaster Tools. That link will show you how to set a sitemap up.

3) Manually let Google know that you’ve made the changes. This will happen when a penalty occurs and if you are registered with Webmaster Tools, they’ll send you an email warning you about that.

From there, they’ll provide a link to send them a message letting them know the fixes you’ve made (you can also elect to just let Google re-crawl your page/s again (you don’t need to do anything if that’s the case) and let them make changes at their own pace, but sending them a message speeds it up, more info).

That is the general way of recovering your site from a Google SEO penalty.

It’s certainly a lot of info but being that there are so many rules and restrictions to improperly doing SEO, when people violate it, there is a way back. The question I pose however, in spite of showing you the recovery method is…

Is it worth going through the trouble of the fix? As I said earlier, I had 3 pages that suffered from an SEO penalty long ago, 2 of them went down due to horrendous backlinks and the other was down due to a maleware infection.

With the first 2 sites, I decided to scrap them and took them down entirely. With the 3rd, I went through the manual review route I talked about by simply cleansing the page of the malware issue and letting Google know, and it was back up in a matter of days.

Looking back, I probably should have done the same thing with my other 2 sites, but I ask if this is all worth it because many people build horrible pages that are beyond recovery and my whole thing about this is that sometimes it’s better to start a brand new page than to go through the effort of cleansing your site of all the bad content, the backlinks, the duplicate content and whatever else I said that causes these penalties and knowing what not to do, to take that into the next new domain and new page you create on it.

Now this is your choice, and you have to decide if your particular page is at that point of where it can still recover or if it’s at the point of, no way, it has to go down.

What I will say is that for the MAIN issues that penalties occur, here are the summarized fixes and while I am giving you a short “fix” for these problems, you will see a lot of them may require tedious attention, which is why I say consider starting a new page:

Just remember though, the manual actions report link I gave you is where I would go to identify the EXACT issue and then pick out how to correct it. And once again, once the fix is made, either let Google know manually or let them see the change automatically because in SEO, Google will come back to your page again and again to check for what’s changed and if they see, you made the changes to fix the issues they cited, they’ll restore your SEO credibility. 

Note: I recently updated a particular issue your site can get penalized for, which is “stealing images” and/or ACCUSED of stealing images (which is what happened to me very recently), which triggers what is known as a DMCA take down notice. 

If you happen to incorrectly have this issue happen, it can lead to a penalty, but it can also be corrected if you take the right steps. I’ve listed them here, so be sure to follow that, because the steps for THIS particular problem are not the same as the steps I listed above for other situations your site may get penalized for.

Note: One more penalty that could occur (and what to do).

There is a penalty scenario which involves people trying to sabotage your site with bad links and in that circumstance, you may need to use something called the Google disavow tool to correct it. 

Personally, I am of the opinion that unless you publish toxic links on your site, you will be fine, but in case, I am wrong, that link will help you correct that problem if someone or a service is trying to attack your site via negative SEO methods.

Everyone who begins a new website with SEO aim HAS to go through the Google Sandbox, but it’s temporary and if you do things right, you’ll get out of it.

My goal today is to help you understand the following things:

• What the Google Sandbox is and if it’s a myth or real (it’s unofficially real).
• Why despite it slowing down initial SEO success, it’s actually a GREAT thing to have.
• I will list exactly what you need to do to get out of it as quickly as possible. It’s not a big deal, but it requires you grow content, be patient and stick through this “waiting period”.

So what is the Google Sandbox?

It’s an unofficial theory that basically says that for the first several months of a site coming into existence and trying to rank on Google, that it’ll undergo this “sandbox” period where it WON’T rank high, no matter…

• How much content it has.
• No matter how many backlinks it gets.
• No matter how many social shares there are.
• And basically no matter how many positive SEO things it does, that until that period passes, it’ll be stuck in the lower end rankings.

Now that period, like I said can be several months and in the sites I’ve personally made, that period has been around 6 or so months in general. 

There are cases too where that period is even longer and generally that applies to sites who do a bit too much affiliate linking or attempt to get ranked for really competitive keywords that already have a ton of websites ranking for them.

When I first experienced this, I was obviously frustrated, having to wait this long, but overtime, as I saw the same sandbox effect play out on the websites I’ve made throughout the years, I’ve become far more wise as to it’s importance…

Now I did mention that this is a theory which is unofficial…

It’s a theory because just about everyone who knows SEO terms and other processes to it, experiences it, including me and it’s unofficial because Google hasn’t officially talked about it from what I know. 

But they do a lot of things to evolve and update their search engine, without publicly announcing it and it is a fact that there have many unannounced algorithm changes. 

But if you’ve ever made a site and tried to rank it, you know it takes longer than expected (at first), even if you do everything right. Clearly, there is at least “some” truth to this theory and in fact, I happen to think it’s real because ever single website I have created with SEO intent always had a long period of months before it started to rank (as did anyone I know who also started in SEO) and that is proof enough of the sandbox existing.

But whatever is done by Google openly or in secret, we as webmasters see the results though (our rankings change) and all the stories say that it’s real. 

Don’t let the sandbox monster stop you…

While many SEO folks freak out, especially when they first encounter this “monster”, it’s really not a big deal.

Because as I’ve said how I’ve personally seen this particular thing play out again and again on all my sites and other on other people’s sites, I know how to proceed to get out of it so what I want to say is…don’t let the sandbox monster scare you.

Do the things I’ll be talking about shortly, and before you know it, your site will be out of it.

Next, I want you to understand why I’m not worried. It isn’t just because of experience and knowing that this thing eventually ends, it’s also because this system makes total sense if you gone through it as many times as I have…

There is no monster, and here’s why:

Google sandbox is in my opinion just another word for “website maturity”, where you simply don’t get that favor from them until your site “matures” or “grows” to the point where it can be taken seriously. And there’s many people who don’t know about this maturity period who get into SEO, don’t see fast rankings, and think they failed, or that this stuff is dead.

What makes that maturity grow? Content and time.

And frankly, there is nothing else that is as important. Think about the progression of a human being and their experiences. As they grow, so do their experiences and with that, their “authority” in the eyes of others grows too.

In my opinion, it is very wise on Google’s part to have this whole set up. A website that DESERVES to get more respect from the #1 search engine has to earn it and it has to earn that with what I said makes it mature: Content and time.

So let me show you how to get out of this thing:

There’s no escaping that maturity period, you HAVE to go through it, so accept that right now. However, despite that being a given, during this maturity, waiting period, you have to do the following 5 things as often as possible, so when your site does overcome that maturity period, it’ll EXPLODE with success:

For the first few months that you are doing this, you ARE going to get frustrated waiting for this maturity thing to end, and you WILL see your rankings go crazy, but hardly every hit page 1, as you’ll be seeing a Google dance…

But no matter how chaotic or frustrating it gets, you HAVE to stick to those 5 tips, especially the tips about blogging frequently as well as interlinking those blog posts, that is huge.

That waiting period WILL end and when it does, the more of those things you did, the better your maturity will look in Google’s eyes. As such, you will see many more rankings hit their mark at top spots.

If you take 2 websites which TRY to utilize these tips and…

1 of them writes 20 blog posts in 6 months, while the other writes 150, by the time both sites are ready to cross that maturity point, Google will love the second site way more and reward it better, for obvious reasons, so that stuff I said about seeds plays a MAJOR role in understanding why during this waiting period, you can’t just wait, you need to work on the site and do those 5 things as much as you can.

Following the sandbox period…

While most people who don’t understand this thing will quit before the waiting period ends, you won’t because you know how it works now. 

Once you pass that waiting period and truly see what I have seen again and again happen to websites that don’t let that waiting period stop them from growing, every future piece of content will now be classified under a much higher tier of ranking in the future.

Now that tier is actually something I talked about when I was explaining the Google dance here. Basically, sandbox sites go through the 2nd and 3rd tiers, while those who pass it following the guidelines I set, are in tier 1. 

So stop worrying about this waiting period for your site. It’s there, it’ll be there and it’ll pass if you do what I told you to.

Here is how 3 sites of mine performed after they passed the sandbox period:

Site 1: For the first 6 months (pre maturity point), it was getting about 20 organic visitors. Post 6 months, it jumped to over 100 daily.

Site 2: Pre maturity point, it was at 10 visits daily, then it jumped to 200 post maturity point.

Site 3: During the pre maturity period, it was at 5 visits a day as well, then it jumped to 50+ visits daily post. And here’s one example of this:

And currently, this is what is going on with my HelpingHandSEO.com. I started it in late August of 2018. This article has been published towards the end of November 2018, which would make my site a little over 3 months old. 

Given that I explained that the sandbox effect lasts for about 6 months, I’m still obviously in it, but I have 0 worries whatsoever because once again, I have gone through this many times, and it always turns out well when you follow those 5 rules I gave you.

Can a website go back to the Google Sandbox?

Here’s some context for this question:

Suppose a website left the Google Sandbox, is experiencing great rankings and traffic. Could such a site ever return back to that sandbox?

The answer is yes and here are the circumstances under which such a thing could happen:

1) You stop creating new content for the website for a VERY long period of time.

Let me give you an example…

I had a page that I only wrote 12 articles on and it was getting some rankings after a few months and showing good potential. I stopped posting on the same page for nearly a year because I didn’t have time for it, and only recently did I go back to the same page and started posting again, and very frequently. 

What I noticed is that this page went back to the sandbox, because despite the new, great content I was putting up, I was barely getting any rankings for it. This is a sign that the page went back to this grading period. But I am following the same guidelines I talked about to get it back out again (and it will). So the solution to this scenario is to literally do what I had been throughout this article.

2) A penalty occurred. 

Google penalizes websites generally for these reasons and if your page was hit with such a penalty (like Google Medic), then it first needs to correct the issue to remove the penalty, and then it must undergo the same grace period (Google’s Sandbox) to get great rankings again.

One option in this case is to start a new website, but that would also mean that this same new website would still have to go through the same sandbox, so you would need to decide if the said page which was penalized is worth saving or if it’s better to just start fresh. If a penalty hits a site that isn’t really big, I’d just recommend you start with a new one.