SEO Archives

The Google Sandbox Effect in SEO

One of the favorite things for people in the make money online and SEO world is to argue over theoretical concepts like “what is the best type of link?” or “how important is getting links from different c-class IPs?”. There are countless concepts out there like this, but few catch the attention of people like the google sandbox effect. Some people don’t believe it exists. Some people are so afraid of it that by the time someones site gets out of the sandbox they are getting their third link and are still on page 20 of the SERPs.

Ok so I’m getting a little ahead of myself I guess. First things first, the google sandbox effect is a phenomena where a site climbs in the SERPs too quickly and subsequently is applied a temporary penalty. The penalty can last anywhere from a couple of months to nine or more. A site that is seemingly going strong, climbing up towards a magical page one ranking, flies too close to the sun and gets knocked down a peg.

So what exactly gets a site relegated to the dreaded depths of the sandbox? Well this is where the debate truly heats up. We all know that the basic thing that happens is a quick climb followed by an even quicker fall, but there is more to it than that. A lot of people think that getting only strong links (in content, from high page rank, and high trust rank pages) will keep you out of the box. Others think the key is building links very slow and steady, not setting off any red flags. To be truthful I don’t have the answer to this question, but one can take a good lesson here anyway. Build your links naturally, which means slowly and from a wide range of quality sites.

Another thing to think about is why does google even have the sandbox? Well that isn’t too complicated to figure out, and since google is logical it also seems to be result that supports the theory. Google has the sandbox to, like everything they do, fight spam. Think about it, spammers are generally into sites for the short haul, the quick buck. When they run the risk of google slapping their sites down it deters them from building in the first place because unlike those of us who build a passive income they want a site to pay off short term.

A final question that is interesting to consider, and probably more useful is what to do if you think you are in the sandbox. The answer there is simple in the MMO world, keep building links. That’s all you need to do if you find yourself in the sandbox, or just in the midst of a normal shuffle. Don’t complicate things unless you’re just looking for some good mental exercise.

Oh and if you want to see the sandbox effect in action here is a good image of my site when it went in for NINE MONTHS! I kept working on this baby thought the rough times and it paid off well. Keep working.

Keyword Selection

One of the most important aspects of making money online is keyword selection. If you don’t pick the right keyword you run two risks:

You won’t be able to rank for it
If you do rank for it, you won’t make any money

As you can imagine either of these scenarios can be extremely frustrating. Even the best of us can run into a keyword the ends up being far harder than it should be, but people new to SEO often choose to go after search terms that they will never rank for. There are some pretty basic ‘guidelines’ that you can use to help you go after terms that you can be successful in ranking your site for (and I say guidelines because keyword selection is more of an art than a science).

If the keyword isn’t in the title, you can beat it
The lower the PR the better (While PR isn’t conclusive it is certainly indicative of page strength)… as an easy guideline if the site is PR 3 or less you can beat it

Really if you find a keyword that satisfies both of those guidelines then you should have little trouble getting your site to rank.

The next part of your consideration is will the term get my site traffic, and more to the point will the term make me money? I know what your thinking… my god this guy is going to give me more guidelines. Well think again. This time it will be a formula :)

First thing you want to do is go look at a keyword tool and see how many EXACT searches the keyword get per month. The next thing you need to look at is what the CPC of the keyword is. With that information you can figure out if the keyword will make you money. Here is what you do:

Exact Searches * .4 *.05 * CPC * .25 = Keyword Income Potential

The .4 is because 1st place in the serps gets around 40% of the traffic for that search, the .05 is because a typical site can count on converting 5% of visitors to ad clicks, and the .25 is because google will generally pay you are 25% of what they pay advertisers. For those of you who aren’t that good at math I’ll simplify that a bit down to this formula, but it doesn’t make as much sense to look at:

Exact Searches * CPC * 0.005 = Keyword Income Potential

Generally if I am building a small niche site I am looking for a keyword with income potential of around $50 or more.

So now you know how to choose a keyword that will both make you money and will pay you something too. Best of luck!

When is the Next PR Update

I wished I knew the answer to this question. This is a question that is normally asked in webmaster’s forums. People speculate when the next update would be. The only people that knows this answer are those Google employees because they are the ones doing it.

Already, there are speculations that the next toolbar PR update would be in July because Google shows us the PR updates after 3 months. For this year 2009, the first toolbar update was on January 1st. The next update was on April 1st. I can speculate that the next update would either be on July 1st or August 1st. I chose 1st because the PR updates had occurred on the 1st day of the month. Google is not obligated to follow a schedule. It can update the toolbar PR any time.

The toolbar PR would be likely updated on July, but the real PR of web pages are updated daily. The toolbar update is lagging behind. What you see on the toolbar is what Google wants you to see. I am saying the true PR value of a site is updated daily because of my experience with an expired domain.

I bought an expired PR 3 domain in February. This was my first time of buying an expired domain. The seller was selling it for $20. I thought that was cheap because to get a permanent link from a PR 2 site, the seller might charge you $10 for 1 link. If you want to buy 2 links, that means you would have to pay $20. I saw that buying the PR 3 domain for $20 is cheap because I can put unlimited links on the site to help me make money online. I did nothing to the domain. I just installed wordpress on the domain. After 3 weeks of the purchase, I visited the site and my toolbar was showing me gray i.e. Page Rank (n/a). Google took the PR away from the site. This was before the April PR update. I thought it was a mistake, that my toolbar was acting weird. I waited for a week and when it still showed me PR n/a, I accepted the fact that the PR is gone and the site needs to be put to rest.

I also have also noticed that when I am searching for a keyword on Google, some new web pages rank higher than some web sites with PR. I wonder why would Google give that new webpage with no PR a higher search engine ranking than the already existing site with PR. Both sites have some of the keywords I am looking for. It is after a PR update, that I would notice that the new webpage would later have a higher PR than the older site.

As no one really knows when next is the toolbar PR update, you just have to continue building quality links. The more quality links you build the higher your PR would be i.e it is much easy to get your site to be PR 1, but it needs more work to get your site to a PR 3. To get your site to be PR 7, you need to know webmasters that have PR 8 sites and above to link to you. You should have a very good network to get that. Don’t get me wrong, it is possible to get a PR 7 from PR 1 sites, but you need like half a million of PR 1 sites. This is according to the tnx PR table.

How to increase Your Page Rank

In the make money online blogosphere, I can say most of the bloggers are obsessed with their page rank and they are always looking for ways on how to improve their page rank. Your pagerank is like a badge showing your success in SEO because it is all about optimizing your blog for search engines. From my understanding of page rank, Google gives you the page rank value based on how its bot sees the authority of your blog. If you have quality backlinks, your pagerank would go up.

Page rank also raises the advertising price of your blog because advertisers want backlinks. Some advertisers don’t want to advertise on a blog that has a PR 0. They would only advertise on a PR 0 blog if the blog has a lot of traffic. But they would not pay you the same amount that they would pay someone with a PR 4 blog and a lot of traffic.

You can increase your PR by commenting on blogs, writing good content, guest posting, article submissions, press releases, directories, and many other ways. Writing good content is subjective. It depends on the reader. If the reader likes it, and he has a blog, he may link to you. If he doesn’t like it, then you get no link. Buying links is expensive and risky. You need to have extra money to be able to do that. Buying links is also not recommended because if you are caught by Google, they would likely penalize. Commenting on other people’s blogs is probably the easiest way to increase your PR.

If you plan on boosting your blog’s PR, you would need to have Firefox browser because it makes your work easier. Other browsers are good, but Firefox has the right SEO tools. You need to install these three add ons: Auto-fill forms, NoDofollow addon and SEO toolbar.

For the Auto-fill form addon, you need to customize the addon. The Auto-fill iron would auto-fill the comment section of a blog. It would autofill the name, url and email section. The NoDofollow addon would tell if a link is nofollow or dofollow (Dofollow gives you some PR juice while nofollow gives you no PR juice, you just get a backlink). To activate it, you have to right click and select the NoDofollow. The SEO toolbar is just to show you the PR of the page.

When you visit a blog with the NoDofollow addon activate, if you see a red color on the commenters names, it means it is a nofollow link. If the color is light blue, then it is a dofollow. You should leave a comment on that page. Then continue dropping comments on blogs and hopefully you would get a PR 3 on the next update. It is good to drop meaningful comments, so that your comments don’t get deleted.

If you are looking for dofollow blogs, you can search on google using the search term “dofollow blogs”. Also, you can make your own list of dofollow blogs. As you visit other blogs and you see it is do follow, copy and paste the URL somewhere. Or you can bookmark the page.

There are also 2 others, I have heard of but I cannot verify it. They are submit your site to directories and linking to your other post. I tried submitting to directories, but has never gotten any PR juice from them. I submitted to PR 3, PR 4 directories that gives one way link. I don’t do reciprocal linking. Linking to your other post is logical because if a site has a PR and you link to a post, some link juice from the PR post would be passed to the no PR post.

Understanding Google Pagerank

Google updated their page ranks of web pages on April 1st (five days ago). For those who don’t understand what is a pagerank, it is an algorithm that Google uses to measure how important a web page is by using the amount and quality of links that are linking to the web page. The higher your page rank, the more trust (not ranking) Google gives to you on their search engine. This is mostly true for sites that have PR 6 – PR 10. It is because it is hard to get those PR values.

I thought it was an April fool’s joke. But I thought, why would Google joke with webmasters like that. I saw the page rank (PR) update on my SEO toolbar. I thought my toolbar was messing with me. I went to the digitalpoint forums to check if there was any threads on PR update and there was a thread. This blog didn’t have any change. It still maintained its PR 4 ranking. I wish it ranked higher.

If anybody is following the news about the threat of the conficker virus/worm, computer experts said that the virus was scheduled to receive new information on April 1st. I was concerned because I don’t want my pc to be affected by the virus. I visited a web page that Microsoft made that was dedicated to protecting yourself from the conficker virus. If you look at the page, you would see that it was created on a April 1st. I don’t know if that site is a blog. I was trying to find out if it has an archive. I could not see anything. So I assume it is a website.

Since I have the SEO toolbar installed on my firefox browser, I look at almost every website that I visit. I noticed that the Microsoft conficker virus page had a PR 6. I was shocked because how can a page that was created within hours of Google’s page rank update have a PR 6 while blogs that have been around for more than 3 years cannot break the PR 4 barrier. Since the site is part of Microsoft website, I can say the link came from Microsoft. Microsoft homepage is PR 9.

Nobody except Google’s employees knows how Google’s page rank system work. The information you read online about Google’s page rank are what Google wants us to believe, or that is speculation from other webmasters.

Your Permalinks Needs to be Changed

If you just installed your wordpress blog, you would notice that the first post page would have a URL of http://www.blogsnd.com/?p=1 and the 1 shows that that is the first post. This URL is called permalinks. If you have this type of URL, it is advisable to change it because

1. Hard to Show on Search Engine : – It is much more harder for search engine to show this type of URL on their because your keyword is not there. Your keyword can be any word. With this type of permalink, search engines have to search through URLs that has 1 in it. But with your keywords, search engines can rank you on their search just based on your permalinks. I have arrived at websites just through the post permalink.

2. Hard to Remember :- I can look at a title of a post and guess what the permalink is. I would only be wrong if the owner decides to shorten the URL.

How to Change the Permalink On WordPress

To change your wordpress permalink, login to Admin Control Panel –> Permalinks.

I choose Month and Year i.e. /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/. (You can copy and paste this in the custom box)

Some people use just /%postname%/. The would make your post to be http://www.yourblog.com/postname instead. People argue that this is good because search engines don’t have to go through something else i.e. date or category to index that webpage.

I choose the Month and Year because of blogger. Google owns blogger so it would have to make it SEO friendly. On blogger, the permalink is done by blogger. The permalink is /2009/01/postname.

Allow Ask and Cuil to See Your Blog

Apart from Google, Yahoo and MSN live search, there are other search engines. These other search engines won’t drive a lot of traffic to your site, but it is still good if you submit your site to them. The other search engines are Cuil and Ask.

Submitting Your Blog to Cuil

Cuil is faily new search engine. It came out in August 2008. The owners plan is to out-rank Google as the top most search engine. Cuil boasts of more than 100 billion web pages it has indexed. I haven’t read about anyone saying she/she got traffic from Cuil to their blog.

To submit to Cuil, go to Submit Site. On the webpage, you have 2 textbox: Your Email and site URL box. In the Your Email box, entering your email is optional. In the Site URL, you will enter your site URL for submission. After submitting, you will see a message on a page saying “Your message has been sent. Thanks for writing us.”

Submitting Your Blog to Ask

I can only find how to submit your sitemap to Ask. I got the information from Ask: webmasters. These are the instructions given to submit your sitemap.

SITEMAP: http://www.the URL of your sitemap here.xml

The sitemap location should be the full sitemap URL. Alternatively, you can also submit your sitemap through the ping URL:

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.the URL of your sitemap here.xml

If done correctly, you would see this message

Your Sitemap submission was successful

Your Sitemap has been successfully received and added to our Sitemap queue.
Thank you for your submission!

Make Your Blog Visible to Yahoo and MSN Live Search

After Google, the next 2 most popular search engines are Yahoo and MSN live search (now Bing). Both search engines have dedicated users i.e. some of the users vow to use only either Yahoo or MSN live search. They would not even think of using Google. Since both sites are search engines, they would have search engine bots to crawl your blog. It is imperative to submit your URL to both Yahoo and MSN live search

Submit Your Blog URL to Yahoo

At the submission page, you can submit your blog and/or submit your blog feed. You have to click on the arrow so that it can expand to show you the submission text box. Also, click on the arrow to revel the text box of the submit your blog feed.

Submit Your Blog To MSN Live (Now BING)

On the submission page MSN just requires you to submit URL and to enter a captcha. The captcha is a 5 letters word and it is legible. I dislike doing captcha because at times the letters are barely legible. After submission, MSN live search tells you that it indexes pages that it accepts pages that meets it standards. You should be patient and check periodically.

I prefer the Google’s submission to these two because you can write a summary about your site using your keywords. But since Yahoo and MSN live submission are free, I will take advantage of it.

My Blog was Indexed in Google in 20 Minutes

When I finished writing the previous post, Can Get Paid to Click Make You Money Online, I decided to check the status of my site on Google. I used the full URL of my blog “http://www.blogsnd.com” to search on Google. To my surprise, the post I wrote like 30 mins ago was there on Google Search.

I was happy because it means Google bot is accessing my site quickly. From the time I published the post, to the time I saw the post on Google was like in 20 minutes. In the picture, it is showing 16 mins. That means that Google got the post 16 minutes ago. I decided to do a search for my blog’s URL without the http:// and the www. and it didn’t the post, can get paid to click make you money.

I was able to get Google’s bot because I pinged my post. I am using wordpress to run this blog. So after writing any post, wordpress automatically pings my site to ping sites.

From this experience, I can say using pings would get your site indexed fast on search engine. But having no backlinks with your keywords wouldn’t get you anywhere on search engine.