Theory On Age Related Penalisation

[bigalreturns]

I noticed recently that for my sig site, waste-some-time.com, while I was receiving no visitors from Google for the keyphrase "waste some time", I was receiving a few for "wast some time", ie with a typo. I checked these results out, and not only does Google pick up the typo and have its "Did you mean..." part, but it also highlighted the *whole* of the word waste in the results.
My site is relatively new, and if you believe all you read, then this means its going to be subject to some age-related penalisation in the SERPs. It appears nowhere close to the top for searches "waste some time", yet is ranked third for "wast some time". Given that it appears, to all intents and purposes, that Google treats these two queries as one and the same, I propose that the query "wast some time" reflects the results as they would be were an age related penalty, or the sandbox as it can be called, not in place.
As such, SEO efforts on new sites can be evaluated by using a typo as a query, as this will discount any penalisation due to the sites age.
What are your thoughts on this?

Alex

[hooperman]

I understood the 'aging delay' (if it exists) to be search term specific. If you search for a competitive term then you wouldn't rank highly, but if you search for a non-competitive term (like "wast some time") then you might rank more highly.

[SmartPoint]

but if you search for a non-competitive term (like "wast some time") then you might rank more highly

Not exactly, hooperman, I think a much better idea would be for Google to suggest the SAME sites for misspelled variant of the search phrase as Google does for correct variant of this search phrase.

Imagine someone searches for 'search engine' and #1 is Google, following normal logics even if someone makes a mistake and types 'searchh engine' in any case this person should see #1 = Google. Otherwise it looks like as if Google is giving wrong sites for the guys who are weak on typing.

And, bigalreturns, thanks for sharing this example. Perhaps Google is *penalizing* you for this phrase exactly. And strange, I thought penalty was about the all types of search, even on the misspelled.

[petertdavis]

I wouldn't be so quick to say that because your site isn't showing up in the top for a certain keyword phrase that it means there's a penalization. Your home page, for example, seems to be optimized for the keyword "Waste-Some-Time.com" and it shows up just fine for that in Google. If you'd optimize for "waste some time" then you might have a better chance for ranking on that term. It doesn't seem particularly competitive. Just changing your title and heading tags might be enough to tip it in your favor. If not, work on some link building.

[bigalreturns]

I wouldn't be so quick to say that because your site isn't showing up in the top for a certain keyword phrase that it means there's a penalization. Your home page, for example, seems to be optimized for the keyword "Waste-Some-Time.com" and it shows up just fine for that in Google. If you'd optimize for "waste some time" then you might have a better chance for ranking on that term. It doesn't seem particularly competitive. Just changing your title and heading tags might be enough to tip it in your favor. If not, work on some link building.

As I'm aware hyphens are regarded as keyword delimiters by Google, so optimising for Waste-SOme-Time has no real difference to optimising for waste some time. If I'm wrong on this then please call me out! Also, if my site is not optimised for "waste some time", then why is it seemingly well optimised for "wast some time"?

[hooperman]

The way I see it is there are pages (including yours) that are deliberately targeting "waste some time" - these pages are more established than yours, so they rank higher.

Nobody is targeting the mispelled version "wast some time", so you stand as much chance as anybody else in ranking highly.

I don't think you can evaluate your seo efforts by searching using this kind of query though, it seems too random. Search for "wastp some time" and you get different results again.

[petertdavis]

As I'm aware hyphens are regarded as keyword delimiters by Google, so optimising for Waste-SOme-Time has no real difference to optimising for waste some time. If I'm wrong on this then please call me out! Also, if my site is not optimised for "waste some time", then why is it seemingly well optimised for "wast some time"?

If your already convinced that your site is perfectly optimized, and that Google is penalizing you, why bother asking for advice?

[bigalreturns]

If your already convinced that your site is perfectly optimized, and that Google is penalizing you, why bother asking for advice?

I wasn't particularly asking for advice, I do believe that internally speaking, my pages are pretty well optimised, although if you have any advice to offer I'd be more than happy to receive it.
The point of my post was to describe what I find to be strange results, offer a potential explanation for them, and see what other's thoughts were.

[petertdavis]

Your index page is well optimized for "Waste-Some-Time.com" as I stated, but not "waste some time" which is not at all the same thing. Maybe even a bit over optomized. It's generally best to put more consideration into optimizing for visitors than for search engines. I can't really figure out why you repeat "Waste-Some-Time.com" so many times on that page, but at the very least put "waste some time" in your title tag.

I really don't find it strange at all that your site doesn't come up on the top of 145,000,000 pages that have that term (according to Google results here). You only have that term once on your page, and it's a link to itself. Anyway, there are a lot of web pages out there with that term, and you only have it once on your page, and in an obscure location on the page and as anchor text to a link, which links just back to the same page. Not really very well optimized.

Here's a good link for some more information on SEO.
http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=182915

[bigalreturns]

I sought advice on a similar subject before I started work on the site, and the opinions I got were that, in the case of incoming link anchor text, the phrase "Waste-Some-Time.com" could be regarded as being seen by the SEs as 4 entities, "Waste", "Some", "Time" and "com", and I assumed that the same would hold true for phrases within the text of the page itself. Do you think that this is not the case, for either anchor text, onpage, or both? I'm interested to hear your opinion, because if you're right then I've got some changes to make!

Interestingly, a query "waste some time" returns 2million less results than "wast some time" according to Google, so one could argue that there's more competition for the typo. Regardless of whether its my aim or not, clearly my page is ranking well for the typo, without a single occurrence of the word "wast" on the page, outside of where it says "waste". Surely every page that optimises for "waste some time" is therefore also including "wast" unintentionally, and therefore why should my site be ranked higher than theirs for this typo query?

[petertdavis]

Who told you that "Waste-Some-Time.com" and "waste some time" are the same thing?

[petertdavis]

I hope it wasn't someone from here.

[bigalreturns]

The discussion was on this forum, I'll have a dig around for it. The basic premise was that with it being a hyphenated domain name, I wanted to know if using the hyphens in anchor text would be ok, as it would increase people's memory of the hyphens. Basically the answer was its not as good as simply "waste some time", but its not much worse and the memoranility aspect could even it out in the wider picture. As I say, with regards to using it on the page, thats my assumption so I blame no-one!

[bigalreturns]

thread is here http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=395453

[petertdavis]

Big difference between anchor text and on-page content.

Try changing it and see what happens.

Work on link building while you're at it.

Good luck.

[bigalreturns]

OK thanks for your time discussing this, much appreciated. Link building is something I try to make myself do at least half an hour of every day even if it is a grind, but I'm sure the results will be worth it!

[petertdavis]

A lot of SEOs believe in getting keywords-in-their-domains.com (me too), but where you can influence it, get your anchor text without the hyphens and .com. Chris recently wrote a nice post on his blog on the topic.