Google Sandbox FAQ - Everything you need to know

What is the sandbox?

Basically its a time period that keywords that are competitive must wait in order to achieve results on Google.

Is it real?

Better believe it.

Does the sandbox effect my entire site?

No! It is keyword related only. Say you make a site for home loans. Everything about the site is home loan this and home loan that. But you name your site www. doodypants.com. Now you will rank well for the term “doody pants” because it is not competitive. But you will be in the sandbox for the keyword “home loans”.

What can I do to avoid the sandbox?

This is really not possible. I dont care what trick you have up your sleeve, you will not rank in the first few pages for “home loans” until you did your time with the other children in the sandbox. This just cant and wont happen until they remove it.

To avoid the sandbox though you can target non competitive keywords. By doing this you are able to jump up in the ranks very quickly but chances are those terms have a crappy search per day so it wont be bringing in much traffic.

What can I do while I am in the sandbox?

Just go on about your business. Create backlinks and work on your content.

How long will I be in the sandbox?

The general term that is thrown out there is 9 months. But this is dependant on how competitive your keyword is. The more competitive the longer you wait.

How can I tell if I am in the sandbox?

Doing a search for allinanchor:”keyword” is the best way to tell. My general rule is if you have go through and search page by page looking for your URL and find it then you are not in the sandbox. But if you get tired of looking and your fingers start to hurt and you quit before you find it then you are in the sandbox.

I heard if I build links slowly I wont go in the sandbox

We have all heard this and I dont know who started this whole theory but I personally dont believe in this. I think someone people just tried this out and they started ranking for the keyword they were targetting. What I bet is that keyword wasnt competitive anyways.

All of the answers are based on MY experiences. Everyone on the internet has had different experiences and has different opinions. If you disagree with anything here I would like to here why. (be detailed)

Google PageRank 10 Websites List (Updated April 2008)

Google describes PageRank (PR) as
“PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages ‘important’.”

Webmasters just dream about getting PageRank 10. Though it is unofficially proved that PageRank has very little effect on SERP, webmasters would do anything to achieve higher PR. There are webmasters or SEO companies who don’t even slightly hesitate to apply Black Hat SEO / spamming for PR even though know they might be blacklisted in Google.

Anyway, here is a list of PageRank 10 websites according to Google PageRank update on April, 2008.

22 Top DoFollow Social Bookmarking Websites

For last couple of year, I’m taking active part in different SEO forums. One of the most common asked question is “How can I get quality backlinks?” or “Why I can’t find my backlinks?” etc etc. Anyway, I’ve come across a list of “dofollow” social bookmarking website lists. Hope none need any introduction with “dofollow” and “nofollow” link attribute.

According to Wikipedia, nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring in the first place.

Here is the list of “dofollow” social bookmarking websites (updated on 31st May, 2008):

Income Report For April 2008

Every month I will make a public post of the income for last month. For example, I will post income report for April sometime in May (usually at the beginning). These reports by no mean used for showing off purpose. The true purpose of them is so that I can be completely transparent about what I make online, and so that years down the road I can show everyone my journey to wealth. Being completely transparent about what I earn online also allows me to show you my biggest mistakes, and what I have learned from the most. The more mistakes I have, the more I learn from, and the more I show you how to avoid. My monthly online income reports are a summary of where I made my money, and where I lost my money.

Note: this income report does not come from this blog but it is the sum of a few other blogs/forums that i own.

Blog Statistics
Numbers in parenthesis are stats from last month to show improvements or declines.

1. Google Pagerank: 1 site PR5, 2 site PR4, 2 site PR 3, 6 sites PR 2, around 10 others site has PR 0 or 1 
2. Technorati Authority 493 (423)
3. Total Visitors 176,794 (155,746)
4. Total Pageviews 514,519 (513,543)
5. RSS Subscribers 842 (660)

Advertising

• Adsense $87.79 ($74.78)
• Adtoll - Removed
• Kontera - $27.38

Consulting Clients

• Link Building Service & Viral Marketing - $2400

Monthly Expenses

1. Google Adwords - $43.61 + $5 signup cost
2. Server cost: 550$ - 2 Quad Core Xeon 5335 for hosting.
3. MSN Adcenter - $0.30 + $5 signup cost (although I have $75 of free spending money now)

Total April Online Revenue - $7749.17

Total April Online Profit - $7195.26

Profit per day - $239.84

Conclusion

April was another very solid month for earnings, and a solid growth for the blog. I reached a pagerank 5 for 1 site already, which was months ahead of my prediction as well. I have started getting my feet wet with affiliate marketing, and I will enjoy doing that and will continue to spend a lot of time learning it in May. I have referred 19 affiliates to neverblue ads, one of whom is making $200-500/day with it, netting me a nice amount of money through the 2% referral system. Congrats to whoever is utilizing neverblue ads from my post! My future goals for a few months from now are to be making $300/day profit, and I believe I should be there in a couple of months easy.

How well did you do this month?

WordPress Search Engine Optimization Server Side

WordPress is ready and willing to be your partner in search engine optimization. This new series will focus on the best ways to optimize your WordPress installations. It is going to be broken down into 2 parts:

1. Server Side WordPress Search Engine Optimization - these articles will deal with the backend, management dashboard, plugins and themes. We will be exploring the proper use of the robots.txt file with WordPress as well as other server-side technology to best optimize your blog and feeds. We will also look at the installation of analytics tracking, setting up specific blog oriented goals and getting your blog ready for submissions and planting.
2. Front End WordPress Search Engine Optimization - these articles will deal with how to optimize your content, obtain trackbacks, submit your blog, submit your feed and plant your articles. We will also be looking at the front end of Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Center, Yahoo Site Explorer, FeedBurner and powerful services such as Technorati, Del.iso.us and mag.nol.ia.

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How to find the best keywords for your website

Alright, so after sometime doing research on the internet and lurking on some webmaster forums such as DigitalPoint, Webmasterworld,… I now can have some experience with SEO would like to share with everyone. If you like it any find it helpful please feel free to link it, but please leave the link to this site too. Here we go.

The basics: Why is it important to invest some time to find the best keywords?

If you target the wrong keywords, your website promotion efforts will be in vain and you will waste a lot of time and money. 

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New List of 75 Do-Follow Forums (PageRanks 0-10)

Well, I’ve been feeling very guilty about not writing real posts for the past couple days, so to make up for it, I’ve been since 4:00 A.M. compiling this massive list of 75 forums that allow signature links and have the “nofollow” HTML attribute removed. This means that you can post to these forums with your URL in your signature, which can drastically improve your websites Google PageRank. These forums have PageRanks ranging from 0-10, which can significantly increase the Google PageRank of your site.

If you manage a forum and would like to see your site on this list, please comment on this post.

I would like to give a big thank you to Digital Point Forums, where I discovered many of these links, and Iwebtool and PRchecker, for letting me get the PR of every link.

If you would like to use this list on your site, you are welcome to do so, but please respect the time and effort I put into making this list by remembering to link back to this site.

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18 Top Tips For Backlinks - All You Need To Know

18 ways to get links

1. Create them yourself. The strength of this method is that it’s completely under your control. You don’t need to wait for others to create links because you’re building them yourself. You can place links in comments, a forum signature, an email signature, exchange sidebar links with other bloggers, add links to your social media profiles… the list continues. You can create a lot of them in a relatively short period of time.

2. Create a meme. Ever seen those post formulas repeated by several bloggers, who all link to each other? These are usually called blog memes, and they’re quite easy to create. The most basic meme model involves answering a few defined questions and ‘tagging’ a number of other bloggers for whom you think the questions would be relevant. This is done in the hope that they’ll answer the questions on their blog and link back to the originator of the meme. The key to success with this method is that your meme results in a relevant and entertaining post. If so, other bloggers will be happy to participate. Another tip: don’t tag really big bloggers, as they rarely, if ever, participate in memes. Instead, tag bloggers you’re friendly with, and make sure your meme is relevant to the audience of every person you tag.
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Comprehensive SEO Guide to Increase Your SE Ranking

Comprehensive SEO Guide to Increase Your Search Engine Ranking
By: Jason Miller

Things that this article will cover which search engines use to determine your positioning are:

• Domain Maturity
• Anchor Texts
• HTML Attributes
• Site Popularity - Linking Strategies
• Title Tags and Headings
• Lists (Ordered and Unordered)
• Content Formatting (Bolding and Italics)
• Site Layout and Design
• Keywords
• Keyword Density
• Content & Content Placement
• Page Doctypes
• Geo-Targeting
• Meta Data
• Code Bloat Reduction
• XML Site Maps
• Website Log Analyzation
• 404 Error Handling
• Robots.txt
• BlackHat Techniques to Avoid

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