Gr1Innovations

Teaching you how to make money online since 1999

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.

Tips On How You Can Increase Your Rankings

In my previous post about how to increase your page rank, I just wrote about using dofollow commenting and a little bit of directory submission. My purpose of that post was to write about how to do dofollow commenting to increase your page rank. In retrospect, that should have been the title of that post.

From my experience and questions I have asked other webmasters, you can increase your search engine rankings by:

1. Blog Commenting – You would comment on blogs that are related to yours. Some blogs require a certain amount of comments before the  blog dofollow the commenter. Anytime, you drop a comment, go back to the blog and make sure your comment is do follow. If not, continue dropping comments till it is do follow.

2. Directories – Submit your site to directories that have a PR. Start submitting your site with the highest PR directories you know of. If you have money, it is better to do paid submission. This shows that the directory owner doesn’t allow spam sites in the directory.

3. Link Exchanges – Exchange links with sites that have a higher PR. As in biology, diffusion occurs from a region of concentration to a region of lower concentration. When you exchange with a higher PR site, the site would leak some page rank juice to you. Make sure your link is dofollow on the blog. But don’t too have hopes, the higher PR blog might lose its PR on the next update.

4. Internal Linking – If you link to your other post pages, you can pass some PR juice to the pages.

5. Guest Blogging – You can blog for other sites in your niche. You are helping them out by giving them unique content for their site and in exchange for your help, you will get a link back to your website in the post.

Another tip is if you can get other bloggers to link to you in their post page. There are 2 ways which this can happen. One is by your control and the other is not by your control. The one that is by your control, you can do it by looking for blogs that allow guest posts, holding a contest or exchanging articles with other bloggers. The one that is not by your control is by writing quality content, by being controversial, and by giving useful information and resources to other bloggers.

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.

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Gr1innovations.com launched way back in 1999 and was one of the first sites of its kind. Then, when the internet really became mainstream a few years later, it gained fame as the #1 ranked make money online blog in the world.