Screw You Google

Ok so the site I blogged about a long time ago that was in the google sandbox came out a while ago. I figured I would let you all know and see. It only took like 9 month, which is one of the longer sandbox runs I’ve ever heard of. I’m now #1 for my main keyword and in the low numbers for a lot of others. Anyway here is the moment we’ve all been waiting for:

Ok so this is the easiest step in the world and I probably shouldn’t even cover it, but I put it in my plan thus I will at least make a quick note about it. Tagging your posts is useful for several reasons 1) it helps places like technorati know what your blog is about, 2) it gives google several more pages of content to look through (even if it does contain duplicate excerpts), and 3) it increases your keyword density on every page.

I’m too lazy really to figure out what keywords I want to use to tag my posts, so I use a super nifty plugin called simple tags. With simple tags I just click a button (click the yahoo one the rest suck) and it scans my content and gives me a list of clickable suggested tags. Look for good longtail tags, not short one worders.

Simple tags has the added bonus of automatically giving you a related posts plugin built in which is great for internal linking which SEO Zombie talks about at his blog.

Anyway I know this one was short but every little bit helps in this game.

To make a solid WP blog site you need probally around 10 articles to get the “blog” underway. There are a lot of ways to generate content. You can write your own content, you can rewrite other content you find, or you can buy content. I personally buy all my content at CyberHub. It’s the cheepest place I’ve found (and if anyone has anything cheaper I’d LOVE to hear it. Articles spinners like “jet spinner” work well for some people but I don’t like them myself.

Keyword Density: I don’t REALLY worry about keyword density. It’s a good idea for sure to have a keyword you are targeting at least once, you can put it more just make sure it doesn’t look spammy. I personally would aim for using the keyword 3-5 times in an article.

Original Content: Google tries to beat down duplicate content, but it doesn’t do a great job by any measure. Grizz talked about using a content scraper successfuly in his post Duplicate Content is Google’s Weak Link. The one thing that is for sure is that you shouldn’t straight up copy an entire page from a site.

Writing content is one of the biggest time expenditures for a web entrapruner. Don’t waste it.

A lot of people don’t know what the sandbox is or when they’ve been sandboxed. Well a phsycologist would say the sandbox is a soul crushing creation by google ment to discourage spam sites and having the side effect of making a lot of web entrpruners go bald.

The google sandbox is really a penalty a site gets when it’s doing TOO well (getting too much search traffic), and it is a new site. This is a major reason why Vic @ blogger unleashed heavily recomends buying pre-owned domains. What I’ve generally expiranced is that your site will hit around 200 search visits a day then get dinged down to 40-50. The sandbox MAY only affect competitive niches. The sandbox MAY only affect sites that build up links “strangley” quickly. The truth is no one knows for sure but these are a couple of theories. I had a site about the upcoming election that was getting well in excess of 1000 search visits a day and it never got sandboxed, it had a TON of crappy links.

Grizz is planning on doing some expiramenting with the sandbox which God willing will be very benifical. He talks about it in his post about flipping pre owned domains.

Anyway the real point of this post was to SHOW people what it looks like to be relegated to the sandbox. A picture says 1000 words so here it is:

The sandbox is a couple things for sure 1) it’s painful 2) it’s real. Other than that not a lot is known for sure.

So I went through and picked out all the long tail keywords (I went with 3 or more words) that included my keyword, which have over 1000 searches a month (so like 30 a day). There were 44 such keywords, so if I can rank #1 for even 10 of these keywords alone it should send me 100 visits per day. This is the goal, ranking for a ton of low competition keywords is better than ranking well for 1 high competitive keyword. It’s easier and faster.

For everyone of the keywords you found that will be a post. Use your keywords as your post title, if you are selling an affilaite product feel free to tack on a sales word like “buy” or “for sale”. I have a lot of success writing reviews. Before buying a product it’s suprising how many people search for [product review].

Using your keywords as your title does two main things. 1 - It get’s your keyword into your URL and 2 - it gives your post internal authority for that keyword (internal anchored links).

Don’t feel the need to get too fancy with this step, it’s important but an easy one to fix (by coming back and making a new post) if you screw it up lol.

So anyone who has read this blog with the hopes of me building a complete tutorial on setting up a site was sadly disappointed as I haven’t posted here in FOREVER (and yes I know the number of you is very small). I’m going to try to get back at it and at the very least complete my step by step tutorial about building a Wordpress site. I’m far from being in the top echelon of MMO or SEO bloggers, but I think I can offer some solid advice as someone who has read A LOT of stuff on the internet and learned my lessons very quickly.

Anyway I will be posting here to complete my tutorial, and hopefully any of you that continue to read will bring the pressure on me to keep writing. 1 because I need something like this to make me think and 2 because I need somewhere to complain about how maddening the quest for position 1 is by times (a lesson a lot of people learn after 6 months and then give up).

Take all my old posts (before this one) with a grain of salt. I’m going to make an effort to go back through them and check for accuracy, but if in doubt about something I’ve said please leave a comment and I’ll address it.

–DaMan