One of the biggest mistakes people make when they start a site is pounding it with links. These days that can get you in hot water with google because if your site gets too big too fast (ie. too many links) and you climb the SERPs like a rocket they figure something must be up.
For those people who believe in natural link building (ie. suckers) it’s not an issue generally. For people who post all over the web from hubpages, to squidoo, to infobarrel, to facebook, etc. it’s not a huge issue either because you simply can’t pound out 100 of those a day (or a week for that matter).
No it’s the people who pay for things like the Keyword Academy’s PostRunner system, or BuildMyRank that end up getting tossed in google’s sandbox. Sure the sandbox is only temporary, but when you are working on a site and seeing consistent growth in the SERPs it really is a kick in the nuts to see its traffic fall to near nothing in a matter of hours.
Ok so what can you do?
1 – Start out slowly: Two or three links a day for a few months. This slow rate of link building also means that you should be investing some serious time in getting the links. Look for relevant sites to write high quality guest posts on. Build some pages on web 2.0 sites like hubpages, squidoo, infobarrel, and whatever else you can find. The nice things about building on sites like these is then if you get to a point where you have too much content and don’t want to link it all to your site (or if you have 2 links to send from 1 article like in postrunner) these are great places to link to your links.
2 – Ramp up slowly: Increase the number of links you send your site per day slow and steady. Stick with two or three for like two months, and then maybe ramp it up by one additional link every couple of weeks. Slow and steady wins the race.
3 – Hold off on the blogrolls: I wouldn’t suggest sending your site blogrolls for at least six months. Despite the fact that all the links are coming from one site, it is still a buttload of links to point at a site early on. You used to be able to get away with hammering a site with blogroll links, but I do not believe this is the case. Even when you do get to the six month mark I would suggest just doing one blogroll trade a month.
4 – Build for a wide range of keywords: Don’t just hit your site for your site for its main keyword but work on a range of related keywords as well. Use the odd “click here” or your site name, or even your sites URL. I also like to build links for some really short keywords that just relate generally to the category your site is about.
Anyway if you keep those four things in mind you should be able to keep your site out of hot water. If your site gets sandboxed anyway don’t feel bad, stop building links, or give up on making money online altogether (although I do love buying sandboxed sites off newbies for a fraction of their value). Just keep working until it comes out.
Best of luck!
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