LinkMoney.org

You all know that in SEO that there is a right way (white hat,) a wrong way (black hat,) and a sort of in-between way (grey hat,) method of obtaining a good Google rank for your keyword of choice. I am not going to tell you any specific methods of white or grey ways because they are discussed ad nauseum throughout the whole Inter-webs and beyond.

I do want to tell you about a case in point of a wrong way that I can speak from experience on, and you are welcome to make comments or ask questions regarding same.

Here is the scenario. About six months ago I purchased a dropped domain name that is an absolute killer, very common three word phrase, that is a marketers dream for a domain name. These words fall into the class of Top 10 best, Best Deals Online, etc. They are three words that always would be used with a specific target product of any type, and not likely that anyone would ever use just those three words alone, and by the way it is a dot com and no hyphens. Oh and it came with a GPR of 3/10.

I had great hopes for this domain and commenced writing articles humping various affiliate products. All was going real well, traffic was starting to build and then one late night offer was too good to resist. You know the type, “100 links from high quality websites, spaced out over a month, guaranteed quality links, only $14.00,” blah, blah, blah…

What the heck, it’s worth a shot right? Wrong.

The company in India did exactly what they said they would do and starting in about two weeks I started to get notices of various websites that would send me an email saying that my link had been accepted for their website and when ever I checked them they were indeed applied. By the end of the month the 100 guaranteed quality links were posted and I started to get tons of offers to increase my fabulous deal. No thanks. Oh yeah, some of the quality sites were X rated.

This excellent domain name still ranks number one for the three word domain name, but that is all that it does. There is absolutely no data shown in the serps for this site, just the domain name, nothing cached, no article titles, no article excerpts, nothing, zip, nada. It’s great to be in first place, but remember no one would ever use just those three words without a product or item included as well. So I reign supreme over everyone with this site, but you will never know it. The site now has a GPR 0/10.

You no doubt have heard that Google uses a sandbox to stick brand new websites in so that they don’t just pop up over night ranking for a keyword over all of their good paying customers. There is a lot of discussion from many people that are all very experienced and most all of them have differing opinions as to whether or not there is such a thing.

I did a little searching on the subject and found some older posts from a few years back where this was talked about, and a couple of them are as follows:

webmasterworld.com

The existence of a new-site “sandbox” (which delays the site being ranked well for months) has been a topic of debate among SEOs.

From a forum that I did not record the url for:

In reply to a question, Matt Cutts of Google said that there wasn’t a sandbox, but the algorithm might affect some sites, under some circumstances, in a way that a webmaster would perceive as being sandboxed.

Mark Mason told me in a recent message that there was no such thing as a sandbox, but call it what you will, this little treasure chest of a domain name is in limbo somewhere. Not one article comes up in G search anywhere.

What am I going to do about it? Not much. I will still write articles for it and not lean on any affiliate deals, just put up articles discussing marketing in general. I will still do some article submissions and link to it, but I will not ask anyone to link to this site, not ever. I will strive to put up quality content and hope that at some time in the future it will have the dark cloud lifted.

I suppose I could go back and try to have some of those 100 links removed but that is a huge pain in the ass. This one site out of over a hundred niche sites and a few primary Blogs is not going to kill me. I learned a huge lesson that I will never forget. The site cost fifteen bucks and some man hours. I’ll move on.

Was I trying to game the system, you bet. Did I know better, you bet. Did I think I would ever get caught, no way. Please take my word for it, don’t try anything like this.

In case you think, well there is no way I would get caught, just think of some of the things that we all do without even thinking. Most of the people I know in Internet Marketing are using WordPress Blogs. If you do, you no doubt use Akismet as a spam blocker right? Well every time you activate Akismet you must include your unique WordPress API key right? Do you think that Mother G does not know each and every site that you own or operate?

If you use Adsense, and most marketers do, then your Google ID is known. If you use Google Analytics, then your G-ID is known. So it doesn’t matter if you spread your websites out over several different hosting companies, there is no place to hide.

Remember, it is not nice to fool Mother Google.