Stop Building Links The WRONG Way! - Part 1

Building links is one of the necessary tasks of a webmaster. This task can be done in much way, but not all ways work the same way or are effective as it should be. Wrong Way #1: Building all your links at one time then stopping Perhaps you've heard the discussion about the so-called "sandboxing" of new sites on Google. What is sandboxing? Google is trying to create a fair rating system for every website in their index. Let's imagine a website selling shoes. A guy called "Competitor Chris" started the website in 1998, and he's kept it updated over time with a constant flow of new content and inbound links. His site is ranking very well in the search engines. Now YOU decide to build a website, selling another type of shoes which are similar to the ones sold by Competitor Chris. You are clever, and you have some cash to invest in your site. You buy all the latest SEO tricks, and you hire an SEO company to build 1000 links in one month and to optimize your site to the max. After only one month in the business, you have double the amount of links that Competitor Chris has, and you are beating him in the search results. Not for long! Google says that's not fair. Why should Competitor Chris's site be penalized, just because you came along with a lot of cash and built links like crazy over a short period of time? Nobody knows if you are even serious about your business, but Competitor Chris has proven to constantly update his site for the last 7 years. So Google puts you in a "sandbox"; they cut you out of the indexing process for 3, 6 or even 9 months to find out how you develop your site over time. It's kind of like putting cold water on a hot engine, to make it slow down and to see if it still works after an undefined time. After the time is over, Google sees that you had little or no development whatsoever. No new links, no new content, no nothing, so they rank you FAR FAR behind Competitor Chris in the search results. You're buried in the search results, you're getting no free traffic, and all that money you paid to the SEO company was a waste. Build your links the right way: If you want long term success, you need to build your links consistently over a long period of time.