increase blog traffic

Does Google Sandbox exist? Does Google penalize webpages which are trying to manipulate search results?

The answer is “Yes, for sure!” and it matters you if you are interested to get blog traffic!

Google has became a very popular search engine by providing accurate and relevant content to its users. Many people are using it to search different information with it. This has also attracted many businessman trying to manipulate Google’s search results to get free visitors.

To safeguard their business, Google take many actions to penalize websites which are trying to manipulate the search results. Google will not rank the site for any keywords within 6 months (or less). I’ve got my websites and blogs penalized many times and I’ve learn how to avoid these mistakes.

These are few ways they used to identify websites which are trying to manipulate the search results:

1. New Domain Name’s Backlinks

Google don’t simply trust new domain names. Just use common sense and think for a while “Is it possible that hundreds of websites link to a brand new website that is one month old everyday?”

Not very possible right?

Google thinks the same too. If you have a domain name that is more than 1 year old, you can get 100 or more backlinks to it and Google will not penalized it. But if the same situation happened to a brand new domain name, Google thinks that there must be a Internet Marketer who plan to set up a new site and quickly dominate some keywords to get traffic.

2. Artificial Backlinks

You have definitely heard of anchor text links. These links are links that link to your blog with the keyword you want to rank for. If I want to rank for “blogging tips”, the links to my blog with look like this: blogging tips. If all the links have the keyword you want to rank for, what do you think that will happen?

If you have a good site that talks about blogging tips, do you think everyone will link to your site using the keyword “blogging tips”. Not very possible right?

People might link to your blog with words such as “here”, “click here”, “your name”, “your blog name”, “http://your-blog-url.com”, etc. Using anchor text links will definitely get your blog to rank for the keywords much more faster. But it looks artificial and there’s a high risk of being penalized.

3. Unnatural Growth Of Backlinks

If your blog have 1 or 2 backlinks and it suddenly increased to 50 backlinks per day, what will Google think.

If your website have good contents, more and more people will read your blog. The visitors to your blog will grow slowly at a constant rate and some visitors might recommend others to your blog by putting a link on their websites. The backlinks to your blog grow with this pattern and looks very natural.

But when a site which gets 1 or 2 backlinks per day is getting 50-100 backlinks within a day, there’s a big jump and it doesn’t look natural. Someone must have did something!

4. Keyword Stuffing

Keep your keyword density less than 7% (it means don’t repeat your keywords more than 7 times in every 100 words). That’s important because it is not very possible to have certain words repeated more than 21 times in a normal 300 word articles. If it exceeds 7%, Google might think that you are trying to manipulate search results by stuffing keywords.

5. The Balance Of Dofollow and Nofollow

Google count dofollow links to your blog is “backlinks”. But do you know Google also count nofollow links. Some people might use the term “flags” for nofollow links. Due to usage of nofollow links have increased, Google start to observe both nofollow and dofollow links to a website.

If all the links to your blog are dofollow, your blog might be suspected. Although dofollow backlinks will help your blog to rank for keywords faster, it is important to have a balance for nofollow and dofollow links to make it look natural.

6. Source Of Links

Where your blog’s backlinks come from? If your blog have hundreds of backlinks but all of them come from 3 websites, will it looks suspicious?

It does. Google might think that you are using some web 2.0 sites that allow you to insert backlinks freely to rank for keywords. These websites might be Squidoo, Blogger, Hubpages and Article Directories.

Even you are not using these sites to build links, try not to get more than 4 links from a site. Get backlinks from different places. You can get backlinks from 1000 different websites with my list of web directories.

7. Link Exchange

Google will not jail your blog for 6 months by exchanging links with other blogs or websites but it will give lower weight. Link exchange in simple english is “I link to you and you link to me”. To Google, it looks like I vote for your site and you vote for mine.

It is another way used by internet marketers to build lots of backlinks in the past. Stop using it and start with building more one-way links!

These are the simple rules you need to play along with Google if you want to get more search engine traffic. If you like this article, subscribe to Blog Traffic Geek’s free update to get new tips to increase blog traffic.



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