Link Building
Traits that are judged to be more essential:
- Link quality, link quantity, link speed resembles with high rank
- Age of Domain
- Your neighbor server must never be spam and trust on domain
- Use content of 2400 words. Avoid poor contents with 300 words
- Applicable Tags and Doc type must be used
- Onpage aspects
- Miscellany on using html tags
- Healthy upholding of site
Try to fix panda dilemmas and build your site in great way. Small web sites may have crucial problem with poor content and stuffed links. Avoid such things and be clear and worth. Try to explore wit ads but in recent amount.
If you web site is bowing down in ranking, Try to hold up all important factors and never panic until next update of Panda. Satisfy your customers with great content and continue worthy link building.
Tags: Image Search Engine Optimization, panda updates
Inbound and Outbound Links are important part in Link building for a site. Numerous numbers of links are not necessary, only valuable worth legal links must be used. Illegal links may dump your page rank too. Search engine always depends on quality of links. There are two kinds of link in seo, Inbound and Outbound links. Inbound states when you get a link from other site. Outbound states when you provide link to others site and get a backlink from them. Outbound link is not as effective as inbound links.
Every Backlink in your site states your sites worthiness. There are many sites which can provide your bad backlinks, it’s very significant to choose a worth site that is related to your site, also with related content. Anchor Text is very fine act in Backlink building. Must provide useful related text, if you click anchor text, a hyperlink opens that relates that site.. Limit on linking is good, buying thousands of backlinks will create un-trust. Search engines observe link farms promoting links in bulk and because buying links is a technique to influence the explore results; this act will be penalized by search engines. By linking with high Quality site it improve your visitors to site. All visitors are in search of good content and good links.
Tags: Inbound links, Outbound links
Natural Backlink plays a vital role in boosting up our website. Main aim in achieving natural backlins is, by producing healthy and supreme quality content in the website. By accomplish natural Backlinks, we produce a great successful way in link building. It attracts customers only by posting worth content. Natural Backlink stands as the superior reason for website developing and a website crushing. In SEO, Link Building resembles as most important feature.
Accurate Techniques to enlarge Natural Backlinks to your Website:
- Main essential step to bring Natural Baclinks to your website is, by providing quality beneficial content.
- This is done just by spreading out quality content.
- Attract customers need by writing relevant bulk of data.
- Try to attract with key terms, controversial things etc.
- Can attract by using important tools and by displaying related video with content.
When stepping to build link, avoid spotlight from just one kind of attack. Your website should target to main different kind of things so, that it push your site to get Natural Backlinks naturally. If possible, your link building should be more alerted on ways that will give confidence other people to make links for you this will end result in the most natural link. 80% of your site development depends on link building. It helps you to rank your site well and good.
Google focus only on valuable content cen percent to get Natural Backlinks. Search engines had work on task to know some good sites which are really in need of Backlinks and focus on them. We must just promote our website in such a great way, so that people will shower more interest to get a Natural Backlink.
- Always may high interest in solving problems by the valuable content you post.
- Display your framework in good visual manner.
- Try to gather more links to different pages of your website.
- Avoid stuffing your worthy content with irrelevant key words.
In order to improve your web pages’ ranking and visibility in the eyes of Search Engines you also have to use the right stuff in your links and not only developing links well.
Normal link structure in HTML page
< a href=”siteurl” title=”some text” rel=”nofollow” >anchor text</a>
Apart from other properties related to “anchor tag”, the following tags are essential in a link structure:
- Title
- Anchor text
- Rel
Title and Rel properties:
The property “title” (displays a tool tip like text while moving the mouse over the link) is used to specify additional information on a link and the “rel” property is used to determine the link (may be external or internal) should be followed or not by a search engine spiders to crawl your pages. When the “rel property” is not set to “nofollow”, the search engine spiders will try to follow the links on the page and it will make a way to crawl new pages.
Anchor text:
Search engines use the anchor text to remember the target pages. If we use our anchor text with care the target page will get advantage being tagged in the search engines and a particular anchor text will become “keyword” if you use it in a consistent way.
You can get a lot of weightage in search engines point of view, when you build many links pointing to your site using that “keyword” and the results in search engines will be fine.
“Keyword” is a special word which is used to differentiate your site or a single page with others – frequently used to obtain visibility with users and search engines.
Conclusion:
From the above, you came to know about the importance of keywords in the link structure. Make search engines to utilize your keywords to reach your site and get more traffic.
Tags: link structure, role of keywords
If you imagine that building an optimized site is like cooking a meal, then keywords are the essential ingredients. Would you attempt to cook a complex new dish without first referring to a recipe? Would you start before you had all the ingredients available and properly prepared?
In our analogy, key words are your ingredients and the rest of the guide (after this part) is your recipe. It is vital that you start by investing time in key word research. This may surprise you, but I would recommend you spend at least 25% of your time on this activity alone! That’s 25% of all your time, including the time you spend designing your site, building it, optimising and promoting it! Quite an investment, eh? But believe me, if you din’t get this part right your meal will not be a very satisfying one and no-one will want to eat it!
What are your 10 key words?
You may think you know straight off. You are likely to be right about most of them but you will almost certainly make three common mistakes. Firstly, you will tend to pick single words (rather than chains of words). Secondly, you will tend to pick the same words used by other people. Thirdly, you will compound this by overusing these key words on your site and underusing related key words. The result will be a poor finished product and sub-optimal ranking or traffic.
So please be patient and walk through the following steps. From part two , you will remember Doug (who sells antique doors, door handles, knockers, door bells or pulls and fitting services).
Like Doug, you should start with a visit to the Overture Keyword Selector Tool (which I recommend in preference to Wordtracker, which is a paid service, and the Google Adwords: Keyword Suggestion Tool, which does not indicate the popularity count of each search phrase). This tool allows you to check for recent word search combinations (and their derivatives) on the Overture search engine, returning search frequencies for each.
Doug enters “antique doors” and is surprized to find that “antique door knob” and “antique door hinge” score higher than “antique door knocker” (his best selling product in the high street store). But far higher still is the category level combination “antique door hardware”. He had never guessed searchers could be so savvy.
Next he tries “antique door knocker” and finds a single derivative “antique brass door knocker”. He had not thought seriously about making brass a keyword. Now it is pencilled in on his list.
Trying “antique door bell” and playing around, he discovers “antique door chime” is about as popular (reflecting a difference between UK and US english). This is also very enlightening, as he is hoping to sell to the US audience by mail order.
Perhaps you begin to see my point. As you will see later in the guide, I recommend a separate page for each product, service or information topic on your site. Through your Overture search, you should come up with an “A” list of about 10 key words for each page. At least four of them are likely to be site-wide in their applicability and common to each page. The remaining six will be page-specific. Put any left-over words onto a second page entitled “B” list.
In Doug’s example, he decides he wants antique, door, brass and hardware on each page in the site. On the door knocker page, he wants (in addition) the key words knocker, iron, decorative, engraved, pineapple and lion.
You too should do the same. If you find this activity overly difficult, can I suggest you revisit your proposition? It is quite possible you have not yet properly thought that through!
Which key words do your competitors use?
Through searching for door knockers on Google and focusing on the top 15 results, Doug brings up their pages. He uses the menu option “view-source” in Internet Explorer to look at the key words used in the page metadata.
He is surpised to find some consistent themes. For example, almost all of the sites he finds whilst searching for “door knockers” also include “door knobs” in their metadata for that page. He also finds that several have used old as one of their kewords, in addition to antique.
Don’t read me wrong here. Metadata (particularly in isolation) is not the route to high search engine rankings (as you will see later). However, top 10 sites generally have done well with their optimization more generally (and their metadata is likely to reflect quality keyword analysis, repeated throughout the site in other ways).
Another key tool is the Google Smackdown, permitting you to compare the overall frequency of two competing keyword sets across the whole of Google’s results. Doug compares “antique door knob” with “antique door knocker” and finds the former is hugely overrepresented on the web compared to the latter (with over 2,000 results vs. under 200). He knows that knob is not searched on ten times more (from his earlier work) so decides to concentrate on knocker as a word where he has less competition.
However, Doug confirms the effectiveness of all competitor combinations using the Overture tool and revises his list to include some of these new words, relegating “pineapple” and “lion” to his B-list, in favour of “old” and “knobs”.
How many related keywords can you identify?
Now for an important third step. Navigate your browser to the GoRank Ontology Finder – Related Keywords Lookup Tool. Like Doug, try entering “antique door knocker” and look at the results. For “antique”, the tool suggests related keywords of old, classic, antique, furniture, vintage, rare, victorian, antiques, collectible.
Hmmm. Now he can see why his competitors use old in their list! Doug runs these related words back through the Overture tool and finds that “Victorian door” yields some decent results, so adds Victorian and Edwardian to his B-list (something he had never thought of previously).
Imagine if Doug had started with victorian door knockers as his gane plan. The Ontology finder would have shown him that antique door knockers was a much more sensible combination. He would then have been changing his A-list.
As Search Engines move ever further towards the use of semantic intelligence in their ranking systems, the use of relared keywords will become ever more important. Make sure you future-proof your site through the liberal use of such words in page text content. More on this later in the guide.
Building key word chains
Perhaps it might surprise you to learn that (based on research by OneStat.com), 33% of all searches on Search Engines are for two word combinations, 26% for three words and 21% for four or more words. Just 20% search on single words! Why does it surprise you, though? Isn’t that what you yourself do when you are searching? Even if you start with one word, the results you get are generally not specific enough (so you try adding further words to refine your search).
Bearing this in mind, it is vitally important to come up with 3-5 keyword chains for each separate page on your site. When you write your page copy later, you will need to ensure that these keyword chains appear with reasonable density in your overall text.
Like Doug, pay a visit to the ABAKUS Topword Keyword Check Tool. Put in your competitor sites one after another and check out the results (using the default search settings). Study closely the two-word and three-word combinations that come up most frequently for each of your key pages in turn.
Through Doug’s exploration (for his door knockers page), he comes up with three favorite two-letter combinations: “door knockers”, “antique door” and “antique hardware”. For three-letter combinations, he settles on “house antique hardware” and “brass door knocker”.
Doug is surprised to note that “door knockers” is more popular than “door knocker”. He has learnt another key lesson; always pluralise your key words where you can. You will achieve higher traffic this way (becuase of the way search engines handle queries).
For a typical 10-page site, you should now have approximately 65-70 A-list words (with four of those being site wide) and perhaps as many as 200 B-list words (many of which will be related key words). You will have perhaps as many as 50 key word chains. Congratulations. You now have all the ingredients you need to get cooking.
It is literally amazing how many people start their online business presence by buying a domain name (close to their business name) and building a brochure-ware page. Only later do they turn their mind to optimizing their site for (i) their audience and (ii) the way their audience find them. Fewer still take a long, hard look at what their competitors are doing first.
Take it from me, the best way to succeed in search engine optimization is to build it into your business development strategy from the very outset. For this reason – before we turn to optimization techniques – my guide consides first those fundamental questions of what, who and where:
What are you selling?
The first and most obvious question in this sequence is whether you are selling a product or a service and the degree to which you can fulfill this online.
To illustrate the thinking involved, I will use (throughout the guide) the (mythical) example of Doug Chalmers, a purveyor of restored antique doors, brass door fittings and accessories, based in Windsor in the United Kingdom.
Doug makes his money from selling doors (20% of total profit), selling door handles and knockers (25%), selling door bells or pulls (25%) and fitting services (30%). He has sold the bells, pulls, handles and knockers across the United Kingdom (and once or twice overseas, through word of mouth recommendation) but only does fitting within a 20 mile radius and rarely sells doors to people who are not local.
When forced to consider his proposition more carefully, Doug admits that he has no desire – or capability – to sell fitting services outside of his immediate locale (due to capacity and travel considerations). However, he can see a big market worldwide for his brass fittings and accessories.
I know what you are thinking, but don’t laugh. Doug may well be right and (after all) knows his business better than you or I. He gets quite a lot of business from American and French tourists that drop into his shop after a visit to Windsor castle. Many take his business card. Initially, they almost always want to see brass door knockers, but often leave with several small items.
Doug has heard the stories about other local businesses who have been successful online. The Teddington Cheese, for example, sells British and European cheeses across the globe and was a winner of the UK eCommerce Awards in 1999. Who would have thought that cheese was a winner online? Well, Teddington Cheese did and have been reaping the rewards ever since!
There are actually a number of key things about Doug’s proposition that we will revisit in subsequent parts of the guide. However, the key point for now is that simply putting up a brochure of all Doug’s products and services is unlikely to be the best strategy. He has some specific and focused aims – and by thinking about them now (and refining them) he stands a much better chance of success online.
Who are your audience?
Segmenting your audience is a key part of any marketing or PR strategy and make no mistake, search engine optimization is essentially a marketing and PR activity (albeit somewhat different to some of the more traditional parts of this field).
Doug generally agrees that he is targeting socio-economic class A/B for his services. These people are typically affluent, professional, white-collar workers living in leafy suburbs. He is in luck there, as such people are disproportionately represented in internet usage worldwide!
Having thought about it, he can readily segment his customers into three types; (1) local-full-replacement, (2) diy-refurbishment and (3) fitted-refurbishment. The first group are local people, looking to replace a whole door which has broken or is drafty. They are generally cost-conscious on the overall package (comprised of products and fitting services). The second group are interested in specific product items (which they are happy to fit themselves). They want advice on how to fit it but don’t want the labour costs. However, they are the least price sensitive group on the product cost and often buy the very best. The third group buy product but want it professionally fitted and finished. They are prepared to pay for quality but are more price sensitive than the DIYers. Where they are not local (which happens) they want a referral from him to someone who can fit locally in their area.
Doug makes the most revenue today (in order) from groups 1, 3, 2. However, he makes the biggest profit margin per sale (in order) from groups 2, 3, 1 – the exact reverse! His own time (and that of his fitters network) is the biggest constraint in his business. If only he could grow the DIY segment, he could substantially improve his overall business profitability.
Hopefully, the point here is obvious. At the very least, Doug’s website should address (perhaps separately) the needs of these three different groups. Ideally, the site will focus it’s firepower on that second group (where the opportunity for unconstrained growth is greatest). Finally, the site needs a local and a global face (to reflect the different geographies of his customers).
Where are your competitors?
No proposition development is complete without an honest assessment of what your competitors are up to. If you are in a locally-based mortar-and-clicks business like Doug, your assessment should take into account both your local and your global competition.
A useful tool to use is the so-called SWOT analysis, where you draw four boxes in a 2×2 table for each competitor. In the first box, you note the strengths of the competitor, in the second their weaknesses, in the third their opportunities and in the fourth their threats. Strengths and weakness are things inherent to their business as it operates today (and generally internal). Opportunities and threats are things external to the business and generally forward looking.
Look at each website objectively and minded like your customers. Consider whether the website was easy to find in the search engine. How many different search words did you try? Do you like the look of the website? Does it address each customer group separately, focus on
one segment or try to be all things at once? Was it easy to get information and do business?
Leave space in the boxes to return to later in the guide (as we will frequently refer back to what your competitors are doing right or wrong).
Before we explore the world of search engine optimization, it is vital that you know a little about how search engines work and their relative market shares. It will help you to prioritize your activities later!
What are Search Engines and who powers them?
There are essentially four different parts to a typical large search engine; the crawler, the directory, sponsored results and the search engine itself.
Crawlers (e.g. Google) automatically visit web pages to compile their listings, making use of a so-called robot or spider (eg. Googlebot), which follows links from one website to another, ultimately compiling an index of all the pages and sites on the internet. These crawlers provide an index, which can then searched by the search engine. You may find that several or all of the pages on your site are indexed in thisway. Some search engines have their own crawler and others buy-in crawler results from others.
Human-powered directories, such as the Open Directory, rely on submissions from the public, which are reviewed by editors for inlusion in the directory. If you get included in a directory, generally only one page from your site (usually your home – or index – page) will be listed.
Crawled results are combined with sponsored results, supplied by pay-per-click (PPC) advertisers, and the results from human-maintained directories to complete the search engine index. Check out the Search Engine Reationship Chart at Bruce Clay inc. for the latest picture on who powers whom. You will note a couple of things right away. Firstly, the dominance of the Google and Yahoo! crawlers and secondly the importance of DMOZ directory results as a back-door for many search engines.
How do Search Engines find and rank sites?
Search engines do not really search the web directly, but rather an index database of the full text of web pages, which itself is drawn from the billions of web pages on the internet’s servers. Search engine databases are selected and built by computer robot programs called spiders.
If a web page is never linked to by any other page, spiders cannot find it, unless the (usually new) site is submitted manually by a human at the search engine’s “add URL” page. All search engine companies offer ways to do this.
After spiders find pages, they pass them on to another computer program for “indexing.” This program uses an “algorithm” to assess the text, links, and other content in the page for “key words” that might be searched on at the engine. This allows the search engine to order results served by their “relevancy” to the search terms used. As each search engine has a different algorithm, it will index sites in a different way and thus serve up different relevant results.
Some types of pages and links are excluded from most search engines by policy. Others are excluded because search engine spiders cannot access them. Generally, the use of frames, flash graphics and dynamic URLs all get in the way of effective spidering and should thus be avoided.
In addition to indexing pages, most algorithms seek to establish the “authority” of a site. A site which is linked to by many other sites (using keyword-rich anchor text) is assumed to be of greater merit than one with no links at all. This activity is called “ranking” and helps search engines to sort otherwise similar results into ever-more relevant and authoratative results.
Which Search Engines are the most popular?
Based on US analysis in January 2005, the top search engines (by share of total searches at home and work) are as follows:
Google Search – 47%
Yahoo! Search – 21%
MSN Search – 13%
All Others – 19%
These shocking figures do not convey the true dominance of the top players, as you have seen from the interdependence of search provision in section (a) above. You could be searching at AOL (part of the “other” 19%) and viewing Google results, for example.
There is also strong anecdotal evidence that Yahoo! and MSN tend to send more searchers through to their sponsored (or paid) results than do Google (due to the prominence of these results on their results pages). As such, for a typical small webmaster who does not use pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, they might get up to 80% of all their traffic from Google’s various sites across the world.
Now you understand the market a little better, you will perhaps understand the obsession many webmasters have with Google! A top-10 position at Google for your key search terms can make your online business fly. If you drop out of that top-10, your business can literally collapse overnight!
This is part 1 of a 7 part series that examines the 7 factors of incoming links that Google considers when choosing a spot for your website in it’s SERP’s.
Why incoming links? First because these are what Google places the highest value on. But, all incoming links are NOT created equal. This 7 part course looks at the kinds of links Google values when “rating” your website in the SERP’s. Each type of link discussed is important to your overall link strategy and consequently your free traffic levels.
The first factor is of course the anchor text used in your incoming links. The importance of the keywords used to link to your website are more important to Google than the content that is actually on your page. You can generally use anchor link text with your keywords and not even have the keywords on the page and still get a good ranking in Google for that term if enough incoming links have that keyword pharse in them.
If you’ve heard of the phrase “Google Bombing” then you know what I’m talking about. Basically it’s when a set of webmasters or blog owners decide to get a page ranked for a certain term and all leave links back to the selected site with the keyword phrase that they want that page to rank for.
The most notorious example of this is the “bombing” done by several blog owners to the George W Bush biograpby page. Several bloggers left links to the page containing the keyword text “miserable failure” and consequently this page turns up as the number 1 result in Google for the term, even though the words don’t appear anywhere on the page.
The “Google Bombing” was done by at most a few hundred links with this link text pointing to the page. Though more links would probably be necissary for a more competative term. Still, it goes to show how important link text is to the rankings of a page.
Google Bombing is nothing new. But what many people don’t realize is that Google places more relevance on the anchor link text that it finds when it first discovers a link to your website. Each consequent link either adds value to that first impression or subtracts from it.
Many times you can control which link google finds first just by knowing where google goes regularly (like on a daily basis) and effectively placing your link in it’s path. This is called “baiting” the google bot to visit your website through this link.
Each link you place after this initial link should further show google that their first impression (or the first keywords it discovered that linked to your website) was and still is correct. Each subsiquent link is a “vote” so to speak to validate Google’s original impression of what your website is about.
Placing that first link to be found by Google is only the first step, but a very important one. Choose your anchor text keywords carefully. Each incoming link you place after this one should serve to validate this first impression. Part 2 will discuss the appearance and disappearance of links over time and how they effect your traffic and search engine placement.
Google has permeated into almost every aspect of life on this planet and beyond. It has become a mainstream fixture for computer and Internet users around the globe. All the while, cementing its position as the only real facilitator of the world’s collective intelligence.
Can you remember a day when you have not Googled?
But Google’s reach doesn’t stop with the mouse or the cursor. It has moved beyond the computer screen, snapping up resources, sites, and people at a frighteningly steady pace. Perhaps, the first indication Google wasn’t just satisfied with staying within the wired confines of the world wide web was when it partnered with universities such as Harvard, Oxford, Stanford and others, to scan and index the contents of their libraries — then making this material accessible through Google Print.
Then it casted its aspirations heavenward with the introduction of Google Maps and Google Earth. Mapping services that bring the world’s geographic information into view, it is as if Google had literally ascended, watching us from far and near, tracking our every move as well as our every keystroke. Even using satellite imagery to provide it with eyes in the sky; leading one to wonder, from those lofty heights can divinity be far behind?
All kidding aside, Google, whether it wants to or not, is developing a god-like reverence in the eyes of many. But is this such a leap of faith? Is the idea of Google as a god-like force in our lives so preposterous? so ludicrous? so sacrilegious?
In prehistoric times, pagans used to worship the sun gods. Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome all had their gods who satisfied the basic human need we have to believe in a superior being or force. They even raised ordinary humans who displayed unusual courage or bravery up to a god-like status. Are we now entering into a new post-modern pagan era — will we be worshipping at the feet of Google?
Not really, we treat all our knowledge givers with respect, some even reach a god-like status. We raise them up above the crowd, give them special meaning or reverence in our lives. Humans have been doing this since we stood upright and walked on the plains of Africa. The shaman or high priest of ancient times — holders of the secret rites, holders of a group’s history or knowledge; we show these people respect and we elevate them to a higher status.
Google falls into this category.
And Google does deserve some respect, as far as the search engine market goes, whether it’s wearing a halo or a cursor — Google is still the only game in town. According to Alexa, a company that tracks web traffic, the top three sites on the Web are 1. Yahoo, 2. MSN, and 3. Google. However, when you compare where people go on these sites — search.yahoo.com accounts for only 9% of Yahoo’s traffic and search.msn.com only 7% of MSN’s total traffic; whereas most of Google’s traffic is search traffic. This is a big distinction.
And what about the purchasing power of these search engines; latest data presented by Score Networks, Inc. shows MSN searchers at 48%, Google searchers at 42% and Yahoo at 31%. That is Google searchers were 42% more likely to purchase online than the regular Internet user.
Another aspect of Google’s commercial might is its online advertising system. Through its Adsense and Adword programs, Google has commercialize and monetized most of the web’s free content. Depending on your opinions or stand, this may be good or bad. Regardless of viewpoints, Google has been more than generous with sharing this ad
revenue with all concerned parties — content providers, web writers and journalists, professional bloggers, ordinary webmasters and marketers — all have reaped the benefits of these programs.
If you feed it with fresh high quality content — Google will take good care of you! In many cases, it can be argued that Google is subsidizing or facilitating the creation of quality content on the Net through its Adsense program.
Google’s dominance of all aspects of the Internet is also taking on a god-like force. It is acquiring and building at an almost god-like speed. Google Acquisitions include: Outride, Blogger, Neotonic Software, Applied Semantics, Ignite Logic, Genius Labs, Picasa, Keyhole, Urchin software… how did all this madness start?
Initially called BackRub, referring to the way it back linked to web sites, Google was founded by Stanford graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Google, the name itself is a play on the word googol, and refers to the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros… opened its doors on Sept. 7, 1998, in Menlo Park, California. It had a corporate staff of three. In 2004 Google offered its IPO with a price per share at $85. By June 7, 2005, Google was worth $80 billion, making it one of the world’s biggest media companies.
Perhaps, one of Google’s most brilliant (some believe absurd) moves, happened just recently. It has applied (via Nelson Minar, a Google Engineer), for patent rights to transmit ads through RSS feeds. Few people know, even more won’t believe, but the Internet has undergone a fundamental shift in how information is exchanged on the web. RSS stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’ and was first popularized by blogs because blogs use XML and RSS feeds to syndicate their content.
Don’t come to us, we will deliver. People can view a site’s contents through RSS readers or an RSS equipped browser without actually going to the sites.
RSS will revolutionize the Internet. Microsoft in its Longhorn Statement has announced the next version of Windows will have RSS integrated into its Operating System. RSS applications, under the Creative Commons license, will change the way we use our computers and the Internet.
Google, if it is successful with this patent application will build on its already god-like status. The stakes are enormous and Google knows it. This patent could put Google directly into the mix, but the rewards are beyond belief! And that’s not all, there are rumors Google may be developing its own RSS powered operating system and browser. Why not, it has the resources and financial clout to easily carry out such an undertaking. Google is already the owner of the domain name “gbrowser.com”!
One can only wonder, is Google positioning itself to not only be the brains of the Internet but also placing itself into the very core of the nasty beast? Does it desire not only to be a mega hub, but also to be an innate part of the whole structure? Positioning itself, in essence, to becoming the web’s nervous system.
Any movement of data, information, or commerce on the Internet will have to pass through and be affected by the Google Factor. More or less, cementing Google’s influence on the whole scheme of things. And in the process, further weaving Google into the very fabric of our lives.
How Do You Know if You’re Stuck in the Sandbox?
Heres a rough set of criteria for you.
- Your site is indexed and appears with the proper title, snippet, and url (www, or no www whichever you picked) type site:www.yoursite.com into Google to check this.
- Your site has PageRank (use the google toolbar, or nichebot.com to find this)
- It is regularly crawled, and the cache dates are newer than 10 days
- On your keyword, you rank in the top 20 for allinanchor, allintext, and allintitle. To check this, type, e.g. allinanchor: and see if you’re in the top 20.
- You do not rank within the first 1000 places for the keyword the site was designed for
Does the Sandbox Really Exist, or is it Just the Google Algorithm?
This is a big controversy. Everyone has a different opinions.
Don’t listen to guys who handle bluechip companies – they optimize older, high PR sites. It’s your everyday mainly-new-sites webmaster who knows this problem intimately. In fact, all the big sites need to do is place the keyword in the title and they’re on the first page. This gives them an unfair advantage not unlike what the media elite has enjoyed for decades.
Regardless of whether the sandbox is a separate phenomenon from the algorithm, the degree of prejudice against new sites has hurt quality of Google’s search results. This is especially true with products and topics both new and urgent. The bigger sites may not be covering it, but searchers end up there without high quality answers.
The common wisdom now is that if you’re looking for new websites, go to MSN or Yahoo instead. Neither of these sites is using this kind of filter. Many websites rank in the top 10 (for their targeted keywords) on these two search engines, yet are nowhere to be found in Google.
Why Would Google Do This?
Google frowns upon SEOs who try to overly influence ranking, so they needed to find a way around SEO factors to deliver quality results. So they’d look for signs of SEO in websites, e.g. how consistent the addition of backlinks is, and how repetitive (vs. natural) the anchor text of backlinks is, and they consider the age of the site and its backlinks.
Redesign Penalties
Similarly, websites that have made the mistake of too comprehensively redesigning their look, content, or navigation have been shocked to find that they get penalized for this updating. Google seems to prefer a frozen in time or moving like molasses kind of internet. But to be fair, this is something that had to be included to beat spammers who were buying old websites and refueling them with keyword spam.
Why Do You Get Sandboxed?
Some sites have gotten out of the sandbox in a week, while others can take up to a year or more. No one knows if any one contributing factor gets you out sooner rather than later. Some point to the age of inbound links, or the frequency with which your site acquires them. Some say that getting too many inbound links too quickly appears artificial, and is flagged as spam. But others argue that Google can’t know how fast a site should acquire links. A website that received national news coverage, for example, could acquire hundreds or thousands of links in a day.
It’s likely that no one outside of Google fully understands how the sandbox works. The problem has been noticed and discussed for nearly 2 years, and no one has given a satisfactory answer. What’s crystal clear is that Google has made it so complex that it cannot be reverse engineered.
How Long Will You Be Making Sand Castles?
The delay seems to vary anywhere from four to 11 months. Since we don’t know exactly upon what and to what degree the filter depends, it’s likely a different magic combination for every site- and this fits with webmasters experience. So keep your head down, develop content, get inbound links, and eventually you’ll get out.
Some suggest that when you come out of the sandbox, you are not fully free. They notice a rationing or gradual increase in traffic from Google. In the meantime, older sites may rank better than you, regardless of the quality of their look, feel, and content. Deal with it. Keep your head down and keep working.
Another wrinkle: some webmasters suggest that sandboxing can occur at the page level, not simply at the site level, and that it is the bigger money/traffic keywords that get sandboxed. Again, this could simply be due to the level of competition on that keyword, as the entire site is not sandboxed if you’re getting rankings and traffic from other keywords.
Is There a Way to Trick the Sandbox Filter?
Some webmasters have talked about finding cracks in the algorithm¦ and they mainly involve backlinks. For a while, there was a lot of linkspam on blogs, but everyone Google, bloggers, and blog providers have cracked down on that exploit.
The real sandbox solution is not a trick – unless you define everything done by the SEO-aware as tricky. The answer is to grow your content and backlinks naturally over time. Don’t look for the quick buck, the quick ranking, or the easy way out. Go back to basics and build websites that people can use and enjoy. Exchange links with quality websites.
To avoid frustration, I’d suggest, if web building is what you do full time, that you begin a new site every month or two eventually, if you’ve worked consistently on all of them, you’ll have one after another emerging from purgatory and flourishing in the rankings.
