Trustrank: Avoiding Google’s Aging Filter

I’ve been launching a load of new affiliate sites lately & have been coming across many different patterns to how the sites are ranked depending on the type of promotion that I use.

By far the easiest method I’ve used to get quick rankings is buying aged domains, however this doesn’t quite work if you really want to brand an affiliate site or create a brandable network of sites with a similar url theme.

Before Google will start ranking your site for popular or mainstream terms you’ll more than likely see traffic trickle through on “long tail terms,” eventually your site will start to appear for more generic terms.

Now, the time period that this starts to happen can depend on a number of factors:

1. The rate at which you acquire links
2. The number of links you acquire
3. The trust of the website that’s linking to you
4. The varation of the anchor text in the links

Many people have nicknamed this aging period the “Sandbox” however I personally think that these are filters applied depending on various scenarios & combinations of events.

I’ve found number 4 to be the single most significant factor at tripping Google’s Filters & really dragging out the initial aging phase. The filters that are applied seem to vary, I’ve seen filters applied on a keyword basis only & also on a sitewide basis.

Once you’ve been hit by the filters I’ve seen it take up to 14 months to recover fully.

9 Rules to obide by when launching a new website

1. Send a Press Release via PRweb when you launch, from what I’ve seen it seems to pass some initial authority to your site.
2. Don’t overdo it, build your links slowly. 5 in the first week, then 10 & so on.
3. Avoid Sitewide links initially, the lack of variation in the anchor text will trip the filters.
4. Don’t go after high PR links, get links from all sources. PR isn’t important, rankings are.
5. If you’re buying links try to get links initially on individual pages. This will often be cheaper & more effective when your site is starting out.
6. Try to balance relevant links with non relevant links (i.e. directories & blog comments).
7. Don’t submit your site to 500 directories with the same anchor text. Keep the anchor text unique.
8. Avoid reciprocal linking until you start to see your site rank. Try to keep these links on topic.
9. Don’t just try to build links to your homepage, promote inner pages. This will help your inner pages rely less on the link popularity of your homepage & rank better.

If you want proof that this works, have a look at the following screenshot from Google Analytics. I launched this site for a client of ours on the 12th August (this is search traffic from Google only).

Here’s a graph from another site that’s been around much longer (about 18 months).

In this second graph you can clearly see a period of filtering just before the huge spike. This period lasted around 3 months. However, since then as the generic rankings have improved so has search traffic.

Slow & Steady: This is how you should be approaching new sites. Naturally as Affiliate Marketers we want rankings RIGHT NOW. I’m sorry but if you take this approach it can actually take you much much longer to get those rankings.

Start slow, experiment with PPC to see how people interact with your site & use that knowledge to help build your keyword focus. If you find yourself getting impatient then do what I do, finish one project, do some initial promotion then move onto the next project. When you start to see traffic increase you know that you can start pushing your promotion a little harder.