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alphadore
08-29-2011, 03:32 PM
Hi guys,

I launched my website around a month ago and recently started building links in quality sources. Yahoo registered around 17 backlinks already and Google non yet. I have used some decent quality articles, blog commenting, directories, and around 30 none no-follow forum postings (including this forum) to build some links.

The strange thing is; for one of my keywords "analyze financial statements" my Yahoo position went from not being in top 100 to 4th position in a week time, stayed there for 3 days and vanished out of first 1000 positions. Then, this morning I just saw that it was back in the first page for the whole day and just now I checked, it is no where to be found again...

In Google, I had a little jump to 75th position for about two days and then now for the past one week it is not in the first 200. In Bing, it's always been steady at position 60 to 65 for the past two weeks.

I am not an SEO expert and my knowledge is limited to several books I read in this field. Can anyone make sense out of what is happening? For Google, I thought that I am sandboxed as it is a new website. But does Yahoo have similar thing? Is this actually being sandboxed or am I doing something wrong? This volatility seems so abnormal to me.


Thanks in advance,
Deniz

billbenson
08-29-2011, 08:42 PM
Some people don't believe in sandboxing, but that's what it looks like if you are a believer.

nealrm
08-29-2011, 09:51 PM
Whether it is sand-boxing or immature links, the results are the same. Being a flash site doesn't help either. Volatility is normal for a new site, expect it for the next several weeks. In the mean time, just work on getting links. Adding content to the site daily will also help.

vangogh
08-30-2011, 12:04 AM
Deniz what you're seeing is pretty normal. New pages often rank well for a time. Call it a freshness boost. Then after a time the page falls back to where you might expect it to have been initially.

As far as a sandbox there really isn't any such thing. Pages aren't held out of the results because they're new. What people call the sandbox is simply the time it usually takes for web pages to rank well for more competitive keyword phrases. The phrase "analyze financial statements" wrapped in quotes returns close to 3 million results. It's likely going to take awhile to rank for it. The temporary ranking you saw is normal.

Try not to get too caught up in where any specific page ranks for a particular query at first, especially ones that are highly competitive. Better would be to focus on overall search traffic and set up some analytics package (if you haven't yet) and see what phrases and pages are bringing in traffic. Those phrases will give you an idea of what your site can rank for right now. You can then build out more content around similar phrases and probably rank for that as well.

Neal is right about the Flash site. Search engines can't read the content inside of a Flash site well. I see your page has content inside a noscript tag. That can help, but it's never going to be as good as creating an html site. Nothing on your site that I can see actually needs Flash. You really will be better off without it and with html. Flash sits on one URL so to a search engine your entire site is a single page. Also consider that things like iPads, which are becoming more and more popular can't read Flash at all. Ultimately Flash is going to hurt all your seo efforts.

Try a site search in Google (site:Analyze financial statements (http://www.alphadore.com)) The results will be all the pages Google currently has indexed for your site. You'll notice it's just the one page. That's all it's likely to be since your site only has one page.

If you were to contact any reputable SEO the first thing they'd want to do is redevelop the site in html. If you're serious about wanting search traffic it's something you should really do.

alphadore
08-30-2011, 03:27 AM
Thank you all for your answers! It was very valuable. I created the page through using Wix.com. I have no coding background so Wix allows me to make any changes I want in the site with their easy to use web application.

I never knew that flash websites could harm the search engine position before. After your posts, I made a little research and you are all very very right. I still enjoy the flexibility it gives me but after a couple of months if I dont see any results, I will burn that flash website down to ground and contact a company to build me a quality html website :) .

Currently, I still have my full time job and have very limited time to orchestrate the entire website, software, content, and analysis tasks. At this phase of the business, getting such things done by myself -when I can spare time- is easier than managing multiple parties. The software/web application is written by my junior partner.

But then again, you are very right. It is a major road block if it hurts my search engine positions badly. Thanks.

vangogh
08-30-2011, 10:57 AM
An easy way to get a website up and running is to install WordPress. Depending on who's your web host it's possible they provide a mechanism to install it with just a couple of clicks. You can install free and low cost themes too. None of it's hard, though if you were to hire someone to install and set it up it should only cost a couple hundred or so.

Ideally you'd have a custom design theme specific to your business, but even a free theme will be better than the all Flash you have now. You can set your site up with an existing theme now and then when you're ready hire someone to develop a custom theme for you.

AllCeasonsDesign
08-30-2011, 03:10 PM
Ideally you'd have a custom design theme specific to your business,

Alphadore, I am just expanding my business into web design. I am still working on building up my web design portfolio and learning the html code. If you find that you want to change from your flash site, I would be happy to help you out just to have more work and experience in that aspect of design. Let me know.

Thank you (I hope this is not against forum rules - please let me know if it is!)
Jodi

alphadore
08-31-2011, 09:30 AM
Ideally you'd have a custom design theme specific to your business,

Alphadore, I am just expanding my business into web design. I am still working on building up my web design portfolio and learning the html code. If you find that you want to change from your flash site, I would be happy to help you out just to have more work and experience in that aspect of design. Let me know.

Thank you (I hope this is not against forum rules - please let me know if it is!)
Jodi

Thanks Jodi. I'll see how it goes with my current website first and then depending on the results will I decide how to go about it. Congratulations on expanding your business.

ThirdSEO
02-09-2012, 01:48 PM
I've experienced the same results before with a couple of the sites I've worked with. None as volatile as what you mentioned but I've definitely jumped to the first page and sunk down 1 or 2 pages after a few days. To me, I think it's a content freshness factor and that search engines give your new site a chance to garner attention for a short bit of time. Then they analyze your site data after a few days and give your site a more relevant position in the search results pages. I'd be willing to bet that the volatile site positioning you're experiencing will smooth out over the next few months. Focus on content and traffic volume for now, those two things are just as important as ranking for target keywords.

vangogh
02-10-2012, 12:55 AM
Another possibility we didn't mention is personalization. You'll get different results for some queries depending on whether or not you're logged into Google. It's not uncommon to see your own site ranking well when signed in and not so well when not signed in.