Going Live

Over the last couple of months, we've been faced with a similar problem from a number of our clients who have web site's going live and it could all be attributed to Gophers. Don't worry, we're not working on the comeback show for BBC's Gordon T Gopher, but it's ironic how his show name "Going Live" is exactly where our problem lies. Back when the Internet was just getting it's act together "Gopher" was a way to search it - before the combined might of MSN, Yahoo! and of course Google; who now dominate what we find online. Like many of our clients, your web site may have built up a good reputation with the search engines and in some cases even been assigned a decent Google rank. Web log analysis shows that the usual suspects of Google, Yahoo! and MSN are providing the lions share of your current traffic and they all have pages cached and indexed - some of our clients have hundreds of quality content pages in the memory banks of the search engines! So where is the problem I hear you ask? Enter the sandbox. Although the search engines are notorious for keeping their algorithms close to their chest, it's widely agreed that some of them have area where they flag web sites as "under surveillance", whilst their credibility and longevity are checked out. It's literally a sandbox, where new web sites are told to play until they can be trusted to be amongst the more trusted and responsible ones already out there. As you may or may not know, search engines are very suspicious of everything. As they fight for their share of the webs viewership, accuracy is everything if they want users to return for their next search. This, combined with the global obsession of everybody with a web site to get to the top of a search results page means they have to watch out for the con artists out there. If you're working on a new web site (or even major changes to an existing one), the intention is usually to improve your search engine performance as well as provide a better service to your visitors. But for all your good intentions, it is highly likely that by pulling off the old and replacing it with the new, you'll be put in the sandbox for a while - and that could mean loosing your Google rank as well as massive amounts of your current traffic levels. Think about it this way - if Google comes and indexed your site regularly and often throws up your pages in a search result, over time it will trust you enough to assign you a decent rank; which in itself will boost your performance again; wonderful! But, if in it's regular visits it finds that the pages it was looking for have disappeared and replaced with something else - it will get nervous and think you're trying to abuse it's trust by dumping new (and possible untrustworthy) content onto it. Into the sandbox you go and all that previous hard work on building credibility has been lost in a simple switch over of content pages! It's actually a very serious issue and one that is all to common to be caught out by. Worse yet, once you've made that switch there is no turning back. Now, unlike some search engine "specialists" out there who will promise that they can trick the search engines into avoiding this (and other) problems, we've been working on effective go-live strategy and techniques that actually work - without any sneaky tactics or code that could upset the search engines even further. So if you don't want to see your web site placed in the sandbox along with Gordon, speak to our team who can help you avoid this costly mistake.