Google Frustrations

I have been going through frustrations of getting good SERPs in Google. Google's algorithm does seem to punish newer sites. Almost all of my sites listed high on certain search terms for their first couple of weeks, but then dropped down in the SERPs.

This has had a drastic impact on the amount of traffic that gets to my site and my income. I still get traffic from MSN, but it is only a fraction of the traffic from Google. I am just waiting for the day that my sites start climbing out of the sandbox and begin getting traffic again.

Right now, two of my main sites are generating $10 to $15 a day together with an average of 75 to 100 page views. If these percentages can hold once google starts sending me traffic, I should see my income quadruple from these small niche sites.

Playing in the Google Sandbox

Well, its official, my main site is definitely in google's infamous sandbox. While my site ranks well for auxilary keyword phrases within my niche, it isn't even in the rankings for any of my sites main keywords. Although this is frustrating, I am still getting traffic from the other search engines to hold me over.

Determining Ranking Without Sandbox

I was curious to see how my site would rank if googles sandbox filter was disabled, so I went on an online expedition to see if there was a way to determine a sites try ranking. Well I found a simple method that will let you perform a google search with the filters disabled (originally I found a tool that would perform this search, but it has been taken offline.)

It seems that you can overwhelm googles filters if you add a search phrase that is over 40 words long. So using the following pattern, you can do a search on your keyword phrases with the filters disabled and determine where your site will rank when the sandbox effect is gone:

"'keyword phrase' a at the is to of on"

Just repeat this pattern in the search box until it is over the 40 word limit. For example, if your keyword phrase was "dog training" you would enter the following sequence into the google search box:

"dog training a at the is to of on dog training a at the is to of on dog training a at the is to of on dog training a at the is to of on dog training a at the is to of on"

Using this technique I found that my site's true ranking would place me on the first or second page for my main keywords.

What am I Doing while I am in the Sandbox?

There is no way out of the sandbox excepting time. It can take 3 to 6 months for a site to get out of google's Sandbox, so in the mean time I am going to concentrate on adding fresh content to my site and increasing the number and quality of its backlinks. I will monitor my sites true ranking using the above mentioned technique, so that I can get my site into the top ten rankings for my main keywords.

Also during this time, I am going to work on launching some one or two page niche sites. This way these sites will season in googles sandbox until I have the time to develop them into full fledged sites.

PR5 Ranking in 30 Days - Part 2

yThis is the second part of the how I acheived a PR5 ranking within 30 days on one of my niche sites. In this part I will descibe the internal linking strategy that I used for my the sites.

Internal Linking Strategy

There are a lot of different internal linking strategies, and each one will have a different impact on how PR (page rank) is distributed throughout your site. If you are not careful in your internal linking, you could be lossing a lot of your PR through your outbound links.

By planning your internal linking you can keep most of your site's PR within itself, and you can then push that PR to your important pages (one's that you want to rank in the SERPs.)

I used a strategy that pushed as much of the site's PR to my home page and reduced the amount of PR that I was giving away through my outbound links. I just used the following simple linking plan as I built my site:

Page Classifications:
The first thing I did was to assign a type or classification to each page that would make up my site. I was then able to create simple linkg rules for each page type.

• Home Page - Main page of my site.


• Content page - Page containing content like an article.


• Category Page - Page that contains links to internal pages of a specific type link articles.


• Outbound Link page - Page that contains outbound links.

Home Page Linking Rules:
The following home page linking rules will perserve and push your sites PR to its internal content pages.

1. Limit the outbound links. I will only link to my other sites from the home Page, and I limit these to 2 or 3.


2. Link to as many internal content pages as your can. This pushes the PR into your site, so that your content pages get indexed faster and move up in the SERPs. My site is fairly small, so I linked to all my content pages from my homepage.
3. Link to all Internal Link Pages.


4. Never link directly to an outbound link page, otherwise you will be giving up too much of your hard earned PR. I did violate this rule on my site by linking directly to a page with all my outbound links. I have since corrected this issue by moving the links into category specific pages, so now my home page links to a link category page.

Content Page Linking Rules:
The following content page linking rules are designed to push as much of the PR up to your Home Page.

1. Always link back to your Home Page (make sure your anchor text for the link is your primary keyword.)


2. Limit outbound links as much as possible. I write most of my own content so I don't have to worry about linking to outside sources on my content pages.


3. Limit all other internal links only to those that make navigation easier. We want to push most of this pages PR to the Homepage.

Category Page Linking Rules:
The following category page linking rules are again designed to keep as much PR within your site. By providing a category page between your home page and all your outbound link pages, you will significantly reduce the amount of PR that is lost through you ourbound link pages.

1. Always link back to your Homepage (again make sure your anchor text for the link is your primary keyword.)


2. Link to the internal pages within this pages category. This will be a list of links to content pages or outbound link pages.


3. Never put any outbound links on these pages.

Outbound Link Page Linking Rules:
These following outbound link page linking rules are designed to dilute the amount of PR passed through the outbound links. By including a lot of internal links, we can reduce the amount of PR lost.

1. Always link back to your Homepage (again make sure your anchor text for the link is your primary keyword.)


2. Link to as many internal pages as you can. This will reduce the amount of PR giving up through the outbound links.


3. Link to the external sites.

As you can see, my linking strategy was very simplistic and easy to follow. Agian this is just one of an infinite number of linking strategies. If you have an internal linking strategy that you would like to share, please leave a comment.